Chapter 5

I

Mr. Philip was crossing Princes Street when he saw them standing in the white circle under the electric standard by the station steps. The strong light fell on them like a criticism, and it seemed to him brazen the way they stood there being so handsome that the passers-by turned about to stare at them. Doubtless, since folks were such fools, they were whispering that the two made a fine pair. Surely it was the vilest indecency that there, under his very eyes, that great hulking chap from Rio bent his head and spoke to Ellen, and she answered him?

"She's standing there making herself as conspicuous as if she were a street girl!" he screamed to himself, and other shouts filled his ears, and he became aware that a cursing driver had pulled up his horse a foot away and that the loafers at the kerb were lifting jeering cries. He charged it one more offence to Ellen's account that she had caused him to make a fool of himself, and vowed he would never think of her again, and ran among the people to see where she had gone. Yaverland was leading her very quickly along towards the North Bridge, and she was now nothing but a dark shape that might, he thought with a glee that he did not understand, have belonged to some ageing woman with a bony body and a sallow face. But then he saw against the lit pavement her narrow feet treading that gait that was like a grave, slow dance, and he realised with agony that it was no use lying to himself and pretending that this was anybody but Ellen--Ellen, who was far different from every other woman in the world and more desirable. She slowly turned, as if her spirit had felt this rage at the fact of her running at her heels, and wished to have it out with him. He gripped his stick and raised a hand to hide his working mouth, and waited for the moment when she would see his face, but it did not come.

The man Yaverland had put out his great ham of a hand and hailed a cab. When Mr. Philip tried to stop a cab he usually had to run alongside it, and often the driver was most impudent, but this swaggering bully checked the thing on the instant, and handed in Ellen and drove off in style as if he was a duke with his duchess in their own carriage. What did they want in a cab anyway? He followed the black trundling square on its spidery wheels as it turned round by the Register House to cross the North Bridge, and imagined the fine carryings on they were doubtless having in the dark in there. He called Ellen a name he had not thought of before.

There was nothing to be done about it. He stood for a while at the railing of that strange garden of concrete walks and raised parterres and ventilating-shafts that lies at this end of Princes Street, built on the roof of the sunk market. Its rectilinear aspect pleased him. It was not romantic, the gates were locked, and one could be sure that there were no lovers trysting there. Presently he moved along towards the West End, keeping still on the side of the street where there were no men and girls prancing about and grinning at each other like dirty apes under the lights, but only empty gardens with locked gates. What had those two been doing? They had come in by train. Unless they had travelled a very long journey it must have been dark before they started. They had been in the country alone together when it was quite dark. There came to him memories of sounds he had once heard when walking through a twilit wood, the crackling of twigs, a little happy cry of distress, and again the crackling of twigs; he had been compelled by something, which was not specially in him but was a part of the damned way life went, to stand and listen, though he knew it was not decent. He saw before him Ellen's face lying white on her spilt red hair, and it added to his anguish that he could not see it clearly, but had to peer at this enraging vision because he could not make out what her expression would be. He had seen her look a thousand ways during these last few weeks when she had kept on drawing his attention to her with her simpering girl's tricks, but he could not imagine how she would look then. It seemed as if she were defying his imagination as she defied him every day in the office, and he turned his mind away from the matter in a frenzy, but began soon to wonder what those two had been doing. They had come in by train. Unless they had travelled a very long journey it must have been dark before they started....

He knew he must not go on like this, and looked round him. He had passed the classic portico of the Art Gallery and was walking now by the wilder section of the gardens, where the street lights shone back from the shining leaves of bushes and made them look like glazed paper, and with their glare made the trees behind seem such flat canvas trees as they set about the stage at theatres when there is need for a romantic glade for a lovers' meeting. How often had Ellen met Yaverland?

He ran across the road. It would be better among the people. It was not so bad if you did not watch them and see how happy they were. Everybody in the world was happy except him. No doubt Ellen and her Yaverland were just bursting with merriment in that cab. Would they be at home yet? She would be telling him all the office jokes. Well, she might, for all he cared. He knew fine that young Innes called him Mr. Philip Hop-o'-my-Thumb behind his back, and he didn't give a straw for it. He stopped in front of a picture-postcard shop that was hung from top to bottom of its window with strings of actresses' photographs, and stood there with a jaunty rising and falling of the heels, bestowing an exaggerated attention on the glossy black and white patterns that indicated the glittering facades of these charmers' smiles, the milky smoothness of their bean-fed femininity. Ah, these were the really fine women that it was worth troubling your head about, from whose satin slippers, it was well known, dukes and the like drank champagne. Who would bother about a wee typist when there were women like these in the world?

But as he looked at them he perceived that there was not one so beautiful as Ellen, and he walked waveringly on, wrathful at the way she insisted on being valuable when he wanted to despise her. A woman who had been watching him for some time, and who knew from a wide experience that he was in one of those aching miseries which make men turn to such as she, slipped from the shadows and murmured to him. She was taller than he, and had to bend her long slender neck that he might hear. He hated her for being a streetwalker and for being taller than he, and began to swear at her. But before he could get the words out of his mouth she had wiped the smile from her pale oval face with the adeptness of a proud woman who had long preserved her pride in the fields of contempt, and glided away with a dignity that denied what she was and what had happened. That struck him as a monstrous breach of the social contract, for surely if a woman was a bad woman she ought to stay still until one had finished swearing at her.

But all these women were vile. There was no measure to the vileness that Ellen had brought on him. For it was all her fault, since he never would have gone with that woman in London if it had not been for the way she had carried on the evening before. At the thought of that night in Piccadilly he began to hurry along the street, pushing in and out among the people as if he insanely hoped to lose the humiliating memory as one can lose a dog, until he remembered how he had had to hurry along beside the London woman because she was a great striding creature and he found it difficult to keep step, and then he walked slowly. It had all been so ugly, and it was a fraud too. It had been his belief that the advantage of prostitution was that it gave one command over women like Ellen without bringing on one the trouble that would certainly follow if one did ill to Ellen; for even if nobody ever found out, she would look at one with those eyes. But this woman was not in the least like Ellen. He had chosen her rather than the girl in the white boots at the other side of the pavement because he thought she had hair like Ellen, but when she took her hat off he saw that she had not. It was funny stuff, with an iridescence on it as if she had been rubbing it with furniture polish. Her flat, too, was not kept as Ellen would have kept it. And she had not been kind, as Ellen, when she moved softly as a cloud about the office fetching him things, or sat listening, with chin cupped in her hands and a hint of tears, to the story of his disappointment about the Navy; had fraudulently led him to believe what women were to men. She had been a cruel beast. For when she had got him to be so very wicked she might have spared him some of the nastiness, and not said those awful leering things so loud. Never would he forgive Ellen for dragging him down to those depths.

He was walking away from Princes Street to his own home now, and the decent grey vacuity of the streets soothed him. If he only had the sense to stay in the district of orderly houses where he belonged, and behaved accordingly, and did not go talking with people beneath him, he could not come to harm. But that would not alter the fact that he had once come to harm. As he passed the house at the corner of his street he saw that a "To Let" board had been put up since the morning. He wondered why the Allardyces were leaving it. He had been at school with the boys. He and Willie Allardyce had tied tenth in the mile race at the last school sports in which he had taken part before he left the Academy. He remembered how they had all stood at the starting-post in the windy sunshine, straight lads in their singlets and shorts, utterly uninvolved in anything but this clean thing of running a race; the women were all behind the barriers, tolerated spectators, and one was too busy to see them; his clothing had been stiff with sweat, and when he wriggled his body the cool air passed between his damp vest and his damp flesh, giving him a cold, pure feeling. Well, he was not a boy any longer. The Allardyces were moving; everything was changing this way and that; nothing would be the same again....

The solidity of his father's house, the hall into which he let himself, with its olive green wallpaper, its aneroid barometer, an oil-painting of his mother's father, Mr. Laurie of the Bank of Scotland, made him feel better. He reminded himself that he belonged to one of the most respected families in Edinburgh, and that there was no use getting upset about things that nobody would ever find out, and he went into the dining-room and poured himself out a glass of whisky, looking round with deep satisfaction at his prosperous surroundings. There was a very handsome red wallpaper, and a blazing fire that chased the tawny lights and shadows on the leviathanic mahogany furniture and set a sparkle on the thick silver and fine glass on the spread table. "Mhm!" he sighed contentedly, and raised the tumbler to his lips. But the smell of the whisky recalled to him the flavour of that Piccadilly woman's kisses.

The room seemed to contract and break out into soiled pink valances. He put down his glass, groaned, and made his mind blank, and was immediately revisited by the thought of Ellen's face on her spilt red hair. An ingenious thought struck him, and he hurried from the room. He met one of his sisters in the passage, and said, "Away, I want to speak to father." It was true that she was not preventing him from doing so, but the gesture of dominance over the female gave him satisfaction.

There was a little study at the back of the house which was lined from top to bottom with soberly bound and unrecent books, and dominated by a bust of Sir Walter Scott supported on a revolving bookcase which contained the Waverley Novels, Burns' Poems, and Chambers' Dictionary, which had an air of having been put there argumentatively, as a manifesto of the Scottish view that intellect is their local industry. Here, in a fog of tobacco smoke, Mr. Mactavish James reclined like a stranded whale, reading the London _Law Journal_ and breathing disparagingly through both mouth and nose at once, as he always did when in contact with the English mind. He did not look up when Mr. Philip came in, but indicated by a "Humph!" that he was fully aware of the entrance. There was an indefinable tone in this grunt which made Mr. Philip wonder whether he had not been overmuch influenced in seeking this interview by the conventional view of the parental relationship. He sometimes suspected that his father regarded him with accuracy, rather than with the indulgence that fathers habitually show to their only sons. But he went at it.

"Father, you'll have to speak to yon Melville girl."

Mr. Mactavish James did not raise his eyes, but enquired with the faintest threat of mockery, "What's she been doing to you, Philip?"

"She's not been doing anything to me. What could she do? But I've just seen her in Princes Street with yon fellow Yaverland, the client from Rio. They were coming out of the station and they took a cab."

"What for should they not?"

"You can't have a typist prancing about with clients at this time of night."

"It's airly yet," said Mr. Mactavish James mildly, continuing to turn over the pages of the _Law Journal_. "We've not had our dinners yet. Though from the way the smell of victuals is roaring up the back stairs we shouldn't be long."

"Father, people were looking at them. They--they were holding hands." He forced himself to believe the lie. "You can't have her carrying on like that with clients. It'll give the office a bad name."

At last his father raised his eyes, which, though bleared with age, were still the windows of a sceptical soul, and let them fall. "Ellen is a good girl, Philip," he said.

The young man began a gesture of despair, which he restrained lest those inimical eyes should lift again. This was not a place, he well knew, where sentimental values held good, where the part of a young and unprotected girl would be taken against the son of the house out of any mawkish feeling that youth or weakness of womanhood deserved especial tenderness. It was the stronghold of his own views, its standards were his own. And even here it was insisted that Ellen was a person of value. There seemed nothing in the world that would give him any help in his urgent need to despise her, to think of her as dirt, to throw on her the onus of all the vileness that had happened to him. He broke out, "If she's a good girl she ought to behave as such! You must speak to her, father. There'll be a scandal in the town!"

Mr. Mactavish James seemed to have withdrawn his mind from the discussion, for he had taken out his appointment diary, which could surely have nothing to do with the case. But when Mr. Philip had turned towards the door, the old man said, amiably enough, "Ay, I'll speak to Nelly. I'll speak to her on Monday afternoon. The morning I must be up at the Court of Session. But in the afternoon I'll give the girl a word."

It was on the tip of Mr. Philip's tongue to cry, "Thank you, father, thank you!" but he remembered that this was merely a matter of office discipline that was being settled, and no personal concern of his. So he said, "I think it would be wise, father," and went out of the room. He ran upstairs whistling. It would be a great come-down for her that had always been such a pet of his father's to be spoken to about her conduct....

II

The door had swung ajar, so Mr. Mactavish James in his seat at his desk was able to look into the further room and keep an eye on Ellen, who was sitting with her back to him, supporting her bright head on her hand and staring fixedly down at something on the table. Her appearance entertained him, as it always did. He chuckled over the shapeless blue overall, just like a bairn's, that she wore on her neat wee figure, and the wild shining hair which resembled nothing so much as a tamarisk hedge in a high wind, though she would have barked like a terrier at anyone who suggested that it was not as neatly a done head as any in Edinburgh. But he was very anxious about her. For some moments now she had not moved, and this immobility was so unnatural in her that he knew she must be somehow deeply hurt, as one who sees a bird quite still knows that it is dead or dying. "Tuts, tuts," he sighed. "This must be looked to. She is the bonniest lassie that I've ever seen. Excepting Isabella Kingan." His right hand, which had been lying listlessly on the desk before him, palm upwards, turned over when he thought of Isabella Kingan. The fingers crooked, and it became an instrument of will, like the hand of a young man.

But he was really quite old, nearly seventy, and well on the way to lose the human obsession of the importance of humanity; so his attention began to note, as if they were not less significant than Ellen's agony, the motes that were dancing in the bar of pale autumn sunshine that lay athwart the room. "It is a queer thing," his mind droned on, "that when I came here when I was young I saw there was a peck of dust in every room, and I blamed old Mr. Logan for keeping on yon dirty old wife of a caretaker. I said to myself that when I was the master I would have it like a new pin and put a decent buddy in the basement. And now Mr. Logan is long dead, and the old wife is long dead, and I have had things my own way these many years, but the place is still foul as a lum, and I keep on yon slut of a Mrs. Powell. Ah well! Ah well!" He pondered, with a Scotch sort of enjoyment, on the frustration of youth's hopes and the progress of mortality in himself, until a movement of Ellen's bright head, such a jerk as might have been caused by a silent sob, brought his thoughts back to beauty and his small personal traffic with it.

"I do not know why she should mind me of Isabella Kingan. She is not like her. Isabella was black as a wee crow. It is just that they're both very bonny. I wonder what has happened to Isabella. She must be sixty-five. I saw her once in Glasgow, in Sauchiehall Street, after she was married, but she would not speak. Yet what else could I have done? I had my way to make, and it was known up and down the length of Edinburgh that her mother kept a sweetie shop in Leith Walk, and she had a cousin who was a policeman in the town. No, no, it would not have been a suitable marriage."

He moved restlessly in his chair, vexed by a sense of guilt, which although he immediately mitigated it into a suspicion that he might have behaved more wisely, made his memory maliciously busy opening doors which he had believed he had locked. But he was so expert in the gymnastic art of standing well with himself and the world that he could turn each recollected incident to a cause of self-approbation before he had begun to flush. For a few moments, using the idioms of Burns' love-lyrics, which were the only dignified and unobscene references to passion he had ever encountered, he thought of that night when he had persuaded little Isabella to linger in the fosse of shadow under the high wall in Canaan Lane and give up her mouth to his kisses, her tiny warm dove's body to his arms. Never in all the forty-five intervening years had he seen such a wall on such a night, its base in velvety darkness and its topmost half shining ghostly as plaster does in moonlight, without his hands remembering the queer pleasure it had been to crush crisp muslin, without his heart remembering the joy it had been to coax from primness its first consent to kisses. Before he could reproach himself for having turned that perfect hour into a shame to her who gave it by his later treachery, he began to reflect what a steady young fellow he had been to have known no other amorous incident in all his unmarried days than this innocent fondling on a summer's night.

But there pressed in on him the recollection of how she had dwined away when she realised that, though he had kissed her, he did not mean to marry her. He saw again the pale face she ever after wore; he remembered how, when he met her in the street, she used at first to droop her head and blush, until her will lifted her chin like a bearing-rein and she forced herself to a proud blank stare, while her small stature worked to make her crinoline an indignant spreading majesty behind her. Yet, after all, she was not the only person to be inconvenienced, for he had fashed himself a great deal over the business and had slept very badly for a time. He exhorted her reproachful ghost not to be selfish. Besides, she had somehow brought it on herself by looking what she did; for her dark eyes, very bright, yet with a kind of bloom on them, and her full though tiny underlip had always looked as if it would be very easy to make her cry, and she had had a preference for wearing grey and brown and such modest colours that made it plain she feared to be noticed. To display a capacity for pain so visibly was just to invite people to test it. If she had been a girl who could look after herself, doubtless she would have got him. He paid her the high compliment of wishing that she had, although he had done very well out of the marriages he had made, for his first wife, Annie Logan, had brought him his partnership in the firm, and his second, Christian Lawrie, had brought him a deal of money. But Isabella had been such a bonny wee thing.

His skin became alive again, and remembered the few responding kisses that he had wheedled from her, contacts so shy that they might have been the poisings of a moth. He shuddered, and said, "Ech! Somebody's walking over my grave!" though, indeed, what had happened was that his youth had risen from its grave. He decided to be generous to Isabella and not bear her a grudge for causing him this revisiting heartache. With the softest pity that the lot of beauty in this world should be so hard, though quite without self-condemnation, he thought how very sure the poor girl must have been that he meant to marry her before she abandoned that proud physical reserve that was the protecting integument of her sensitive soul. That sensitiveness seemed fair ridiculous when things were going well with him; but once or twice in his life, when he had been ill, it had appeared so dreadful that he had desired either to be young again and give a different twist to things, or to die utterly and know no after-life.

No, dealing unkindly with the lasses was an ill thing to do. It made one depressed afterwards even if it paid, just as cheating the widow and orphan did. His eyes went back to Ellen, who had moved again. "I must settle this business of Nelly's," he thought. "Of course, Philip is quite right. It would not be suitable. Besides, he is getting on nicely with Bob McLennan's girl, and that would be a capital match even for us. But I must put things straight for my Nelly, my poor wee Nelly." He rose, first feeling for his crutch, for he was fair dying on his legs with the gout, and padded slowly towards the open door.

And at the sound of that soft bearish tread Ellen felt as if she were going to die. There had arrived at last that moment for which she had waited with an increasing faintness all that day, since the moment when Mr. Philip had caught her in front of the mantelpiece mirror. She had gone to look at herself out of curiosity, to see whether she had in any way been changed by the extraordinary emotions that had lately visited her. For she had spent two horrible nights of hatred for Yaverland. She had begun to hate him quite suddenly when he brought her home to say good-night to her mother. There had broken out the usual tumult in the dancing-hall, and he had raised his head with an intent delighted look that at first she watched happily, because she loved to see his face, which too often wore gravity like a dark mask, grow brilliant with interest. But he quickly deleted that expression and shot a furtive glance at her, as if he feared she might have overheard his thoughts, and she saw that he was anxious that she should not share some imagination that had given him pleasure.

She went and sat on a low stool by the fire, turning her face away from him. So he was as little friendly as the rest of the world. Surely it was plain enough that she lived in the extremity of destitution. The only place that was hers was this drab little room with the shaking walls and peeling chairs; the only person that belonged to her was her mother, who was very dear but very old and grieving; and though everybody else on earth seemed to have acquired a paradise on easy terms, nobody would let her look in at theirs. It appeared that he was just like the others. She folded her arms across her breast to compress her swelling misery, while he sat there, cruelly not hurrying, and said courteous things that afterwards repeated themselves in her ear all night, each time a little louder, till by the dawn they had become ringing proclamations of indifference.

Yaverland had turned on the doorstep as he left and told her that, though he believed he had to motor-cycle to Glasgow the next day to see one of his directors there, it was just possible there might be a telephone message at his hotel telling him he need not do so; and he had asked that if this were so might he spend the time with her instead. Because of this she had lived all Sunday in the dread of his coming. Yet very often she found herself arrested in the midst of some homely action, letting some tap run on to inordinate splashings, some pot boil to an explosion of flavoured fumes, because she was brooding with an infatuated smile on his rich colours and rich ways, on the slouch by which he dissembled the strength of his body, the slow speech by which he dissembled the violence of his soul. But there returned at once her hatred of him, and she would long to lay her hand in his confidingly as if in friendship, and then drive her nails suddenly into his flesh, so that she would make a fool of him as well as hurt him. At that she would draw her cold hands across her hot brow, and wonder why she should think so malignantly of one who had been so kind--so much kinder than anybody else had ever been to her, although she had no claim upon him. Yet she knew that no argument could alter the fixed opinion of her spirit that Yaverland's kingly progress through the world, which a short time ago she had watched with such a singing of the veins as she knew when she saw lightning, was an insult to her lesser height, her contemned sex, her obscurity. The chaos in herself amazed her. The glass showed her that she was very pale, and she wondered if such pallor was a sign of madness. "I will not go daft!" she whimpered, and began rubbing her cheeks with her knuckles to bring back the colour; and saw among the quiet reflected things the queer face, its features pulled every way with derision, of Mr. Philip.

He said twangingly, "Ten minutes past nine, Miss Melville!"

Her heart was bursting with the thought of what made-up tales of vanity he would spin from this. "Later than that. Later than that," she told him wildly. "And I have been here since dear knows when, and there is nobody ready to give me work."

He shot out a finger. "What's that by your machine?"

She noticed that his finger was shaking, and that he too was very pale, and she forgot to feel rage or anything but immeasurable despair that she should have to live in this world where everyone was either inscrutably cruel or mad. She murmured levelly, dreamily, "Why, papers that you have just put down. I will type them at once. I will type them at once."

For a time he stood behind her at the hearth, breathing snortingly, and at times seeming to laugh; said in a half-voice, "A fire fit to roast an ox!" and for a space was busy moving lumps of coal down into the grate. A silence followed before he came to the other side of her table and said, "Stop that noise. I want to speak to you." The gesture was rude, but it was picoteed with a faint edge of pitifulness. The way he put his hand to his head suggested that he was in pain, so she shifted her hands from the keys and looked up vigilantly, prepared to be kind if he had need of it, for of course people in pain did not know what they were doing. But since there was no sense in letting people think they could just bite one's head off and nothing to pay, she said with spirit, "But it's ten minutes past nine, and what's this by my machine?"

Mr. Philip bowed his head with an air of meekness; he seemed to sway under the burden of his extreme humility, to be feeling sick under the strain of his extreme forbearance. He went on in a voice which implied that he was forgiving her freely for an orgy of impertinence. "Will you please take a note, Miss Melville, that Mr. Mactavish James wants to speak to you this afternoon?"

"He usually does," replied Ellen.

"Ah, but this is a special occasion," said Mr. Philip, with so genial an expression that she stared up at him, her eyebrows knit and her mouth puckering back a smile, her deep hopeful prepossession, which she held in common with all young people, that things really happened prettily, making her ready to believe that it was all a mistake and he was about to announce a treat or a promotion. And he, reading this ridiculous sign of youth, bent over her, prolonging his kind beam and her response to it, so that afterwards, when he undeceived her, there should be no doubt at all that she had worn that silly air of expecting something nice to be given to her, and no doubt that he had seen and understood and jeered at it. Then the wave of his malice broke and soused her. "Things have come to a head, Miss Melville! There's been a client complaining!"

She drew herself up. "A client complaining!" she cried, and he hated her still more, for she had again eluded him. She had forgotten him and the trap he had laid to make a fool of her in her suspicion that someone had dared to question her efficiency. "Well, what's that to do with me? Whoever's been complaining--and no doubt if your clients once began at that game they wouldn't need to stop between now and the one o'clock gun--it's not likely I'm among his troubles. So far as my work goes I'm practically infallible."

"It's not your work that's been spoken of," said Mr. Philip, laughing. "Perhaps we might call it your play."

He had begun to speak, as he always did when they were alone, in a thick whisper, as if they were doing something unlawful together. He had drawn near to her, as he always did, and was hunching his shoulders and making wriggling recessive movements such as a man might make who stood in darkness among moving pollutions. But his glee had gone. It had grown indeed to a grey effervescence that set a tremor working over his features, made him speak in shaken phrases, and unsteadied everything about him except the gloating stare which he bent on her bowed head because he was eager to see her face, which surely would look plain with all her colour gone. "There's just a limit to everything, Miss Melville, a limit to everything. You seem to have come to it. Ay, long ago, I have been thinking! You'd better know at once that you were seen late on Saturday night, hanging about with a man. It sounded like yon chemist chap from the description. You were seen entering a cab and driving away. I won't tell you"--he stepped backwards, swelled a little, and became the respectable man who has to hem a dry embarrassed cough before he speaks of evil--"what the client made of it all." And then he bent again in that contracted, loathing attitude, as if they were standing in an unspacious sewer and she had led him there, and with that viscous sibilance he said many things which she could not fully understand, but which seemed to mean that under decent life there was an oozy mud and she had somehow wallowed in it. "But doubtless you'll be able to give a satisfactory explanation of the incident," he finished; and as she continued to bow her head, so that he could not see the effects of this misery which he had so adroitly thrust upon her, he leant over her crying out he hardly knew what, save that they were persecuting things.

But when she slowly raised her chin he saw with rage that though he had spoilt the colour of her skin with fear, and made her break up the serene pattern of her features with twitching efforts to hold back her tears, he had not been able to destroy the secondary meaning of her face. It had ceased to be pretty; it no longer offered lovely untroubled surfaces to the lips. But it still proclaimed that she was indubitably precious as a diamond is indubitably hard; it still calmly declared that if evil had come out of his meeting with her it had been contrived out of innocence by some dark alchemy of his own soul; it still moved him to a madness of unprofitable loyalty and tenderness. In every way he was defeated. It seemed now the least of his miseries that he had failed to destroy his father's persuasion that Ellen was a person of value, for it was so much worse, it opened the door to so long a procession of noble and undesired desires, that he had not been able to destroy. That same persuasion in himself. He counted it a fresh grievance against her, and planned to pay it out with cruelty, that she had made him waste all his efforts. For though he had certainly made her cry, he could not count that any great triumph, since under the shower of her weeping her gaiety was dancing like a draggled elf. "Och me!" she was saying. "You want me to give you an explanation? But when I've got an appointment to talk the matter over with the head of the firm, what for would I waste my time talking it over with the junior partner?" And she began to type as if she was playing a jig.

He made a furious movement of the hands. She thought contemptuously, "The wee thing he is! Even if he struck me I should not be afraid. Now, if it were Yaverland, I should be terrified...." The idea struck through her like a pleasure, until there fell upon her as the completion of a misery that had seemed complete, like the last extreme darkness which falls on a dark night when the last star is found by the clouds, the recollection that Yaverland also was detestable. Ah, this was a piece of foolishness between Mr. Philip and herself. In a world where misery was the prevailing climate, where there were men like Yaverland, who could effortlessly deal out pain right and left by simply being themselves, it was so foolish that one who had surely had a natural turn for being nice, who had been so very nice that firelit evening when they had talked secrets, should put himself about to hurt her. Her eyes followed him imploringly as he went towards the door, and she cried out silently to him, begging him to be kind. But when he turned and looked over his shoulder she remembered his tyranny, and hardened her piteous gaze into a stare of loathing. It added to her sense of living in a deep cell of madness, fathoms below the rays of reason, that she had an illusion that in his eyes she saw just that same change from piteousness to loathing. For of course it could not be so.

Her quivering lips said gallantly to the banged door: "Well, there is my wurrk. I will forget my petty pairsonal troubles in my wurrk, just as men do!" And she typed away, squeezing out such drops of pride of craftsmanship as can be found in that mechanical exercise, making no mistakes, and ending the lines so that they built up a well-proportioned page, so intently that she had almost finished before she noticed that it was funny stuff about a divorce such as Mr. Mactavish James always gave to one of the male clerks to copy. But that was all the work she had to do that morning, for Mr. Mactavish James was up at the Court of Session and Mr. Philip did not send for her. She was obliged to sit in her idleness as in a bare cell, with nothing to look at but her misery, which continued to spin like a top, moving perpetually without getting any further or changing into anything else. Presently she went and knelt in the windowseat, drawing patterns on the glass and looking up the side-street at the Castle Rock, which now glowed with a dark pyritic lustre under the queer autumn day of bright south sunshine and scudding bruise-coloured clouds, seeing the familiar scene strangely, through a lens of tears. She fell to thinking out peppered phrases to say of the client who had told on her. Surely she had as much right in Princes Street as he had? And if it was too late for her to be there, then it was too late for him also. "It's just a case of one law for the man and another for the woman. Och, votes for women!" she cried savagely, and flogged the window with the blindcord. Ten to one it was yon Mr. Grieve, the minister of West Braeburn, who fairly blew in your face with waggishness when you offered him a chair in the waiting-room, and tee-heed that "a lawyer's office must be a dull place for a young leddy like you!" Well, she knew what Mr. Mactavish James thought of him for his dealings with his wife's money....

But the peppered phrases would not come. One cannot do more than one thing at a time fairly well, and she was certainly crying magnificently. "Such a steady downpour I never did see since that week mother and I spent at Oban," she thought into her sodden handkerchief. "It was a shame the way it rained all the time, when we had had to save for months to pay for the trip. But life is like that...." Ah, what did they think she had been doing with that man Yaverland? The shocked dipping undertones of Mr. Philip's voice, the ashamed heat of his eyes, were just the same as grown-up people used when they told mother why they had had to turn the maid away, and that, so far as she could make out, though they always spoke softly so that she could not hear, was because the maid had let somebody kiss her. What was the use of having been a quiet decent girl all her days, of never stopping when students spoke to her, of never wearing emerald green, though the colour went fine with her hair, when people were ready to believe this awful thing of her? They must be mad not to see that she would rather die than let any man on earth touch her in any way, and least of all Yaverland, whom she hated. There came before her eyes the memory of that bluish bloom on his lips and jaw which she had noticed the first time she saw him, and she rocked herself to and fro in a passion of tears at the thought she was suspected of close contact with this loathsome maleness. She felt as if there was buried in her bosom a harp with many strings, and each string was snapping separately.

"Och, votes for women!" she said wearily; and tried to make herself remember that after all there were some unstained noble things in the world by singing whisperingly a verse from the Women's Marseillaise. "There's many singing that song to-day in prison that would be glad to sit and breathe fresh air and look at a fine view as you're doing, so you ought to be thankful!" And indeed the view of the Castle did just for that moment distract her from the business of weeping, for there had been a certain violent alteration of the weather. The autumn sunshine, which had never been more than a sarcasm on the part of a thoroughly unpleasant day, had failed altogether, and Edinburgh had become a series of corridors through which there rushed a trampling wind. It set the dead leaves rising from the pavement in an exasperated, seditious way, and let them ride dispersedly through the eddying air far above the heads of the clambering figures that, up and down the side-street, stood arrested and, it seemed, flattened, as if they had been spatchcocked by the advancing wind and found great difficulty in folding themselves up again. She looked at their struggles with contempt. They were funny wee men. They were not like Yaverland. Now, he was a fine man. She thought proudly of the enormousness of his chest and shoulders, and imagined the tremendous thudding thing the heartbeat must be that infused with blood such hugeness. He must be one of the most glorious men who ever lived. It surely was not often that a man was perfect in every way physically and mentally.

She turned away and hid her face against the shutters, weeping bitterly. But her mind had to follow him in a kind of dream, as he walked on, masterfully, as one who knows he has the right to come and go, out of that wet grey street of which she was a part, to wander as he chose in strange continents, in exotic weathers, through time sequined with extravagant dawns and sunsets, through space jewelled with towns running red with blood of revolutions or multi-coloured with carnival. In every way he was richer than she was, for he had more joy in travelling than she would have had, since over the scenic world she saw there was cast for him a nexus of romance which she could not have perceived.

Everywhere he would meet men whom he had captained on desperate adventures, who over wine would point ringed fingers at mountain ranges and whisper of forgotten mines and tempt him to adventures that would take him away from her for ever so long. Everywhere he would meet women, hateful feminine women of the sort who are opposed to Woman Suffrage, who, because of some past courtesy of his, would throw him roses and try to make him watch their dancing feet. She sobbed with rage as she perceived how different from her the possession of this past made him. When he reached Rio he would not stand by the quiet bay as she would have stood, enraptured by the several noble darknesses of the sky, the mountains, and the ship-starred sea, but would go quickly to his house on the hill, not hurrying, but showing by a lightness in his walk, by a furtive vivacity of his body, that he was involved in some private system of exciting memories. He would open the wrought-iron gates with a key which she had not known he possessed, which had lain close to him in one of those innumerable pockets that men have in their clothes. With perfect knowledge of the path, he would step silently through the garden, where flowers run wild had lost their delicacy and grew as monstrous candelabra of coarsened blooms in soil greenly feculent with weeds; she rejoiced in its devastation. He would enter the hall and pick his steps between the pools of wine that lay black on the marble floor; he would tread on the rosettes of corruption that had once been garlands of roses hung about the bronze whale's neck; he would look down on the white limbs of the shattered Venus, and look up and listen to the creaking flight of the birds of prey that were nesting under the broken roof; and he would smile as if he shared a secret with the ruin and dissipation. His smile was the sun, but in it there was always a dark ray of secrecy. All his experience was a mockery of her inexperience. Her clenched fist beat her brow, which had become hot....

All that day her mind had painfully enacted such fantasies of hatred or had waited blankly for this moment which the old man's shuffling step was now bringing towards her. She braced herself, though she did not look up from the table.

"Nelly, I've brought you a bit rock from Ferguson's."

She gazed cannily at the white paper parcel. It was the largest box he had ever given her; he always gave her sweeties when Mr. Philip had been talking against her. Ought she therefore to deduce from the unusual size that he had been saying something unusually cruel? But, on the other hand, surely no one could ever give sweeties to a girl if they thought she had let herself be kissed. "You're just too kind, Mr. James," she said mournfully.

"Take out a stick and give me one. What for did I have false teeth put in at great expense if it was not that I might eat rock with my Nelly? I'll take a bit of the peppermint. My wife is a leddy and will not let me eat peppermint in my ain hoose." He always spoke to Ellen, he did not know why, in the same rough, soft, broad Scots tongue that he had talked with his mother and father when he was a wee boy in the carter's cottage on the Lang Whang of the Old Lanark Road, that he still talked to his cat in his little study at the back of his square, decent residence. "Ay, that's right. But lassie, what ails ye? You're looking at the box as though you'd taken a turn at the genteel and become an Episcopalian and it was Lent. If you've lost that fine sweet tooth of yours ye must be sickening for something."

"Och, me. I'm all right," said Ellen drearily, and picked a ginger stick, and bit it joylessly; and laid it down again, and pressed her hand to her heart. She hearkened to the racing beat of her agony with eyes grown remote and lips drawn down at the corner with disgust, like a woman feeling the movements of an unwanted child. And Mr. Mactavish James, was so wrung with pity for the wee thing, and the mature dignity with which she wore her misery, and the next moment so glowing with pleasure at himself for this generous emotion, that he beamed on her and purred silently, "Ech, the poor bairn! I will go straight to the point and make her mind easy." He wriggled into an easier position in his chair, readjusted his glasses, and settled down to enjoy this pleasant occupation of lifting the lid off her distress, stirring it up, and distilling from it and the drying juices of his heart more of this creditable pity.

"Nelly," he said jocosely, "I've been hearing tales about you."

She answered, "I know it. Mr. Philip has told me."

"Ay, I thought he would," said Mr. Mactavish James comfortably. He could also make a pretty good guess at the temper his son Philip had put into the telling. For he was an old man, and knew that a young man in love may not be the quiet, religious lover pondering how a minute's kissing under the moon can sanctify all the next day's daylight that the poets describe him. He may be inflamed out of youth's semblance by jealousy, and decide that since he has no claws to tear the female flesh as it deserves, he will do what he can with cruel words and treachery. It is just luck, the kind of man one happens to be born. Well, it was just luck....

"He's tremendous excited about seeing you and Mr. Yaverland, Nelly."

Her eyes were blue fire. "Och, 'twas him that saw me! He said it was a client."

He covered his mouth with his hand, but decided to give his son away. All his life he had been rejecting the claims of beauty and gentle things, and he could be sure that his well-brought-up family would go on doing it after he was in his grave. Over this one little point, which did not really matter, he could afford to be handsome. "Aye, 'twas Mr. Philip that saw you," he owned easily, and swerved his head before the long look, pansy-soft with gratitude, that she now turned on him. The girl was so inveterately inclined to dilate on the pleasant things of life that his generosity in admitting that his son was a liar, and thus assuring her that her shame had not been as public as she had supposed, quite wiped out all her other emotions. She fairly glowed about it; and at that the old man felt curiously ashamed, as if he had gained a child's prattling thanks by giving it a bad sixpence, although he could not see what he had done that was not all right. He rubbed his hands and tried to kindle a jollity by crying, "Well, what would I do but tell you? If I hadn't, ye'd have been running about distributing black eyes among my clients just on suspicion, ye fierce wee randy!"

"Och, you make fun of me--!" She smiled, palely, and gnawed the ginger stick, her jaw being so impeded by her desire to cry that she could not bite it.

"Poor bairn! Poor bairn!" he sighed, and his pity for the little thing seemed to him so moving, so completely in the vein of the best Scottish pathos, that he continued to gaze at her and enjoy his own emotion, until a wryness of her mouth made him fear that unless he hurried up and got to the point she would rush from the room and leave him without this delicious occupation. So he went on, speaking cosily. "I thought little of it. You are a good lassie, Nelly, and I can trust you. I know that fine. Sometimes I think it is a great peety that Philip was not born a wee girl, for he would have grown up into a fine maiden aunt. He is that particular about his sisters you would not believe. Though losh! he has no call for anxiety, for they're none of them bonny."

Ellen was pulling herself together, trying to take his lack of censure as a matter of course and choking back the tears of relief. "I'd not say that," she said in a strangled voice. "Miss Chrissie isn't so bad, though with those teeth I think she would be wiser to avoid looking arch. Och, Mr. James, what's come to you?" For he was rolling with a great groundswell of merriment, and slapping his thigh and chuckling. "The things the simplest woman can say! No need for practice in boodwars and draring-rooms! It comes natural!" She looked at him with wrinkled brows and smiling mouth, sure that he was not being unkind, but wondering why he laughed, and murmured, "Mr. James, Mr. James!" It flashed on her suddenly what he meant, and she jumped up from her seat and cried through exasperated laughter, "Och, men are mean things! I see what's in your mind! But indeed I did not intend to be catty! You must admit, though she's your own daughter, that Miss Chrissie's teeth are on the long side! That's all I meant. Och, Mr. James, I wish you would not be such a tease!" However, he continued to laugh bellyingly, and she started to run round the table as if to assail him with childish tuggings and shakings, but to leave her hands free she popped the ginger stick into her mouth like a cigarette, and was immediately distracted to gravity by important considerations. "What am I doing, eating ginger when I hate the stuff? I'll nip off the end I've been at and put it back for mother. She just loves it, dear knows why, the nasty hot thing. I'll have one of the pink ones. They've no great flavour, but I like the colour...."

While she bent over the box, her mind and fingers busy among the layers, the old man turned his bleared eyes upon her and wondered at her, and rejoiced in her variousness as he had not thought he would rejoice over a useless thing. For she had altered utterly in the last few seconds. When he had come into the room she had been a tiny cowering thing of soft piteous gazes and miserable silences, like a sick puppy, too sick to whimper; now she was almost soulless in her beauty and well-being, and as little a matter for pity as a daffodil in sunshine. She was completely, absorbedly young and greedy and happy. The fear that life was really horrid had obscured her bright colours like a cobweb, but now she was radiant again; it was as if a wind had blown through her hair, which always changed with her moods as a cat's coat changes with the weather, and had been lank since morning. He was not used to variable women. His two wives, Annie and Christian, had always looked much the same. He remembered that when he went in to see Aggie as she lay in her coffin he had examined her face very carefully because he had heard that people's faces altered when they were dead and fell into expressions that revealed the truth about their inner lives; but she did not seem to have changed at all, and was still looking sensible.

To keep the situation moving he drawled teasingly, "Och, you women, you women! Born with the tongues of cats you are, every one of ye, and with the advawnce of ceevilisation ye're developing the claws! There was a fine piece in the _Scotsman_ this morning about one of your Suffragettes standing on the roof of a town hall and behaving as a wild cat would think shame to, skirling at Mr. Asquith through a skylight and throwing slates at the polis that came to fetch her. Aw, verra nice, verra ladylike, I'm sure."

"Well, why shouldn't she? Yon miserable Asquith--"

"Asquith's not miserable. He's a good man. He's an Englishman, but he sits for Fife."

"Anyway, it was Charlotte Marsh that did it. And if she's not a lady, who is? Her photograph's given away with this week's _Votes for Women_. She's a beautiful girl."

"I doubt it, Nelly."

"I'll bring the photo then!"

"Beautiful girls get married," said Mr. Mactavish James guilefully, watching for her temper to send up rockets. "What for is she not married if she is so beautiful?"

"Because she's more particular than your wife was!" barked Ellen, admitting reluctantly as he gasped and chuckled, "Yon's not my own. I heard Mary Gawthorpe say that at an open-air meeting. She is a wonder, yon wee thing. She has such a power of repartee that the interrupters have to be carried out on stretchers."

"Ah, ye're all impudent wee besoms thegither," said Mr. Mactavish James, and set his eyes wide on her face. From something throbbing in her speech he hoped that the spring of her distress had not yet run dry.

"Why are you not more respectful to the Suffragettes? You're polite enough to the Covenanters, and yet they fought and killed people, while we haven't killed even a policeman, though there's a constable in the Grange district whose jugular vein I would like fine to sever with my teeth for what he said to me when I was chalking pavements. If you don't admire us you shouldn't admire the Covenanters."

"The Covenanters were fighting for religion," he murmured, keeping his eyes on her face.

"So's this religion, and it's of some practical use, moreover," she answered listlessly. She drew her hands down her face, threw up her arms, and breathed a fatigued, shuddering sigh. The conversation had begun to seem to her intolerably insipid because they were not talking of Yaverland.

She rose to her feet, moved distractedly about the room, and then, with a purposefulness that put into his stare that terrified cold enmity with which the sane look upon even the beloved mad, she swept two rulers off her desk on to the floor. But she knelt down and set them cross-wise, and then straightened herself and crooked her arms above her head, and began to dance a sword-dance. Even her filial relations to him hardly justified such a puncture of office discipline, and he sat blowing at it until he saw that this was a new phase of her so entertaining misery. It is always absurd when that pert and ferocious dance, invented by an unsensuous race inordinately and mistakenly vain of its knees, is performed by a graceful girl; and Ellen added to that incongruity by dancing languorously, passionately. It was like hearing the wrong words sung to a familiar tune. And her face was at discord with both the dance and her performance of it, for she was fixedly regarding someone who was not there. "She is fey!" he thought tolerantly, and gloated over this fresh display of her unhappiness and his pity, though a corner of his mind was busy hoping that Mr. Morrison would not come in. It was unusual in Edinburgh for a solicitor (at any rate in a sound firm) to sit and watch his typist dancing.

But soon she stopped dancing. Her need to speak of Yaverland took away her breath.

She slouched across the room to the window, laid her cheek to the glass, and said rapidly, "It is bad weather. It is bad weather here an awful lot of the time. Mr. Yaverland says there is a place in Peru where it is always spring. That would be bonny." She felt relieved and warmed as soon as she had mentioned his name, and sat down easily in the window-seat and smiled back at the old man.

"Ehem! So this Mr. Yaverland has surveyed mankind from China to Peru, as the great Dr. Johnson says."

But she could not speak of Yaverland again so soon. She tried to make time by wrangling. "Why do you call him the great Dr. Johnson? He was just a rude old thing."

"He was a man of sense, lassie, a man of sense."

"What's sense?" she cried, and flung wide her arms. Her body pricked with a general emotion that was not relevant to the words she spoke, and indeed she was not quite aware what those were. "Sense isn't sitting in your chair all day and ruining the coats of your--of your digestion drinking too much tea and contradicting everybody and being rude to Mrs. Thrale when the poor body married again."

"It was a fule's marriage," said Mr. Mactavish James; "the widow of a substantial man taking up wi' an Italian fiddler."

"Marriage with one man's no worse than marriage with another, the way they all are," said Ellen darkly, and got back to her argument. "And hating the Scotch and democracy, and saying blunt foolish things as if they were blunt wise ones--that's not sense. And if it were, what's the good of living to be sensible? It's like living to have five fingers on your hand. And life's so short! Mr. James, does it never worry you dreadfully that life is so short? I wonder how we all bear up about it. One ought to live for adventure. I want to go away, right away. There are such lots of lovely places where there are palms, and people get romantically shot, and there's a town somewhere where poppies grow on the roofs of mosques. I would like to see that. And queer people--masked Touaregs--"

"Lassie, you are blethering," said Mr. Mactavish James, "this is a pairfect salad of foreign pairts."

It had to come out. "Mr. Yaverland says Peru is lovely. He has been both sides of the Andes. He liked Peru. There are silver mines at Iquique and etairnal spring at the place whose name I have forgotten. Funny that I should forget the name of the one place on airth where there is etairnal spring! If I had all the money in the world I would not be able to go there because I have forgotten its name!" She laughed sobbingly, and went on. "And he's been in Brazil. He lived for a time in Rio de Janeiro." She stared fixedly at her mental image of the fateful house where there was a broken statue on a bier, shook herself, and went on. "And he's travelled in the forest. He's seen streams covered with the big leaves of Victoria Regia like they have it in the Botanical Gardens, and egrets standing on the bank, and better there than in ladies' hats. I wonder if I would be a fool if I had the money?--if I would wear dead things on my head? But indeed there are ways I think I would always be nice, however rich I was--ways that don't affect me very much, so that they're no sacrifice. And he's seen lots of things. Sloths, which I always thought were just metaphors. And ant-eaters, and alligators, and jaguars. And--"

"If you go to London," said Mr. Mactavish James, "you'll be losing your heart to a keeper at the Zoo."

"Who's losing their heart to anybody?" she asked peevishly. "And you needn't sneer. He's done lots else besides just seeing animals. Once he steered a ship in the South Seas for two days and two nights when the crew were down with the New Guinea fever. And another time he was working at a mine in Andalusia. The miners went on strike. He and some other men put up barricades and took guns. They defended the place. He is the first man I have ever known who did such things. And they come natural to him. He thinks no more of them than your son," she said nastily, "thinks of playing a round on the Gullane links."

"Imphm. I wonder what he's been doing traiking about like this. Rolling stones gather no moss, I've heard."

Her eyes blazed, then narrowed. "Oh, make no mistake! He earns a lot of money. He can beat you even at your own game."

Mr. Mactavish James tee-heed, but did not like it, for she was looking round the room as if it were a hated prison and all that was done in it contemptible; and these things were his life. "Well, you know best. And what's this paragon like? I've not seen the fellow."

"He's a lovely pairson," she said sullenly.

He began to loathe these two young people, who were all that he and his stock could not be, who were going to do the things his age could not do. "Ah, well! Ah, well!" he sighed, with a spurious shrewd melancholy. "He'll be like me when he's old, Ellen; all old men are alike."

She looked at him coldly and said, "He will not."

Her brows were heavy and the hand she held at her bosom was clenched. The rain was beating on the window-panes. The fire seemed diluted by the day's dampness; and there was a chill spreading through his mind as if they had been debating fundamental things and the argument had turned unanswerably to his disadvantage. He twisted in his seat and looked sharply at her, and though the mirror of his mind was apt to tilt away from the disagreeable, he perceived that she was regarding him and the prudent destiny he had chosen with a scorn more unappeasable than any appetite; and that the destiny she was choosing with this snarling intensity was so glorious that it justified her scorn. He felt a conviction, which had the vague quality of melancholy, that he was morally insolvent, and a suspicion, which had the acute quality of pain, that his financial solvency was not such a great thing after all. For Ellen looked like an angry queen as well as an angry angel. It seemed possible that these young people were not only going to have a mansion in heaven, but would have a large house on earth as well, and these two establishments made his single establishment in Moray Place seem not so satisfactory as he had always thought it. These people were going to take their fill of beauty and delight and all the unchafferable things he had denied himself that he might pursue success, and they were going to take their fill of success too! It was not fair. He thought of their good fortune in being born strong and triumphant as if it were a piece of rapacity, and tried to wriggle out of this moment which compelled him to regard them with respect by reversing the intentional, enjoyed purity of relationship with her and finding a lewd amusement in the fierceness which was so plainly an aspect of desire. But that meant moving outside the orbit of dignity; and he knew that when a man does that he gives himself for ever into the hands of those who behold him. So he worked back to the position of the rich, kind old man stooping to protect the little helpless working-girl.

He pushed the box of sweets across the table, and said in a tender and offended voice, "You're not eating your sweets, Nelly. I hoped to give you pleasure when I bought them."

One would always get her that way.

Someone was being hurt. Immediately she had the soft breast of the dove. "Oh, Mr. James!"

"I wish I could give you more pleasure," he went on. "But there! I've been able to do little enough for you. Well do I know it"

"You've done a lot for me. You've been so good."

"It's a pity we should have fallen out over a stranger. But I know I am too free with my tongue."

"Oh, Mr. James!"

"Never mind, lassie. I'm only an old man, and you're young; you must go your own way--"

"Oh, Mr. James!" She rose and ran round the table to his side; and at the close sight of her, excited and yet muted with pity, brilliant as sunset but soft as light rain, the honest thing in him forgot the spurious scene he was carpentering. He exclaimed solemnly, "Nelly, you are very beautiful."

She was startled. "Me, beautiful?"

"Aye," he said, "beautiful."

For a moment she pondered over it almost stupidly. Then she put her hand on Mr. James's shoulder and shook him; now that her sexual feelings were focussed on one man she treated all other men with a sexless familiarity that to those who did not understand might have seemed shameless and a little mad. "Am I beautiful?" she asked searchingly.

"How many times do you want me to say it?" he said.

"But how beautiful?" she pursued. "Like a picture in the National Gallery? Or like one of those actresses? Now isn't that a queer thing? I'm all for art as a general thing, but I'd much rather be like an actress. Tell me, which am I like?"

"You're like both. That's where you score."

She caught her breath with a sob. "You're not laughing at me?"

"Get up on your chair and look in the glass over the mantelpiece."

She stepped up, and with a flush and a raising of the chin as if she were doing something much more radical than looking in a mirror, as if, indeed, she were stripping herself quite naked, she faced her image.

"You've never looked at yourself before," said the old man.

"'Deed I have," she snapped. "How do you think I put my hat on straight?"

"It never is," he retorted, and repeated grimly and exultingly, "You've never looked at yourself before."

She looked obliquely at her reflection and ran her hands ashamedly up and down her body, and tried for a word and failed.

"Are you not beautiful?" he said.

"Imphm. There's no denying I'm effective," she admitted tartly, and stepped down and stood for a moment shivering as if she had done something distasteful. And then climbed on to the chair again. "In evening dress, like the one Sarah Bernhardt wore in La Dame aux Camélias, I dare say I could look all right with a fan--a big fan of ostrich feathers." This time she faced the image directly and almost gloatingly, as if it were food. "But considering my circumstances, that is a wild hypothesis. I suppose ... I ... am ... all right. But I suppose I'm just good-looking for a private person. I'd look the plainest of the plain beside Zena or Phyllis Dare. Would I not? Would I not?"

"You'd look plain beside no one but Venus," said Mr. Mactavish James, "and her you'd better with your tongue."

"Ah!" She breathed deeply, as if at last she drank. "So it doesn't matter my chin being so wee? I've always hankered after a chin like Carson's. I think it makes one looked up to, irrespective of one's merits. But if what you say is true I've no call to worry. I'll do as I am." She shot an intense scowling glance at the old man. "You're sure I'll do?"

"Ay, lass, you'll do," he answered gravely.

She burst into a light peal of laughter, as different from her usual mirth as if she had been changed from gold to silver. "Oh dear! Oh dear!" she cried, her voice suddenly high-pitched and femininely gay. "What nonsense we're talking! Do--for what? It's all pairfectly ridiculous--as if looks mattered one way or another!" An animation of so physical a nature had come on her that her heart was beating almost too quickly for speech, and her body, being uncontrolled by her spirit, abandoned itself to entirely uncharacteristic gestures which were but abstract designs drawn by her womanhood. She lifted her face towards the mirror and pouted her lips mockingly, as if she knew that some spirit buried in its glassy depths desired to kiss them and could not. She stood on her toes on the hard wooden seat, so that it looked as if she were wearing high heels, and her hands, which were less like paws than they had ever been before, because she was holding them with consciousness of her fingers' extreme length, took the skirt of her frock and pulled it into panniers. She wished that she were clad in silk! But that lent no wistfulness to her face, which now glittered with a solemn and joyful rapacity, for her unconscious being had divined that there were before her many victories to be gained wholly without sweat of the will. "Ah!" she sighed, and wondered at her over-contentment; and then went on with her delicate shrill chatter, glowing and holding herself with a fine frivolity that made it seem almost as if she were clad in silk, and passing from flowerlike loveliness to loveliness.

"It's a pity Mr. Yaverland cannot see you now," said the old man, half from honest jocosity and half from an itch to bring the creature back to this interesting suffering of hers.

Gasping with laughter, though she kept her eyes gravely and steadily on her beauty, she answered, "Yes, it is a pity! It is a great pity! He's very handsome too, you know. We'd make a bonny pair! Oh dear, oh dear!"

Mr. James sat up. "What's that? What is it you're saying? Hec, you're talking of making a pair, are you?" Amusement always made his voice sound gross. "Has he asked you to marry him then, ye shy wee besom?"

She swung round on her toes, her face magic with passion and mischief. "Give me time, Mr. James, give me time!" she cried, and her head fell back on her long white throat, while her laughter jetted in shaking, shy, thin gusts like a blackbird's song. And then she ceased. Her head fell forward. Her gown dropped from her outstretched hands, which she pressed against her bosom. A second past she had filled with spring this office damp with autumn; now she made it more asperous and grey than had November, for her season had changed to the extremest winter. She pressed her hands so hard against her breast and in a voice weak as if she were very cold she said, "Oh, God! Oh, God!"

"Eh!" gaped Mr. James.

She had made a fool of herself. She had said dreadful things. She had boasted about something that could not come true, that would be horrible if it did. Her face became chalk white with such agony as only the young can feel.

Mr. James's gouty leg crackled out pains as he tried to rise, and he had to sink back in his chair and look up at her through the vibrating silence, whispering, "Nelly, my dear lass."

At that she shot at him such a cold sidelong glance as one might shoot at a stranger who has let one know that he has overheard an intimacy, and with movements at once clumsy and precise she got down from her chair and put it back at the table. She stood quite still, with her hands resting on it, her face assuming a mean and shrewish expression. She was remembering a woman who had been rude to her mother, a schoolfellow of Mrs. Melville's, who had married as well as she had married badly, and had allowed consciousness of that fact to colour her manner when they had run against each other in Princes Street. Ellen was trying to imitate the expression by which this bourgeoise had given her mother to understand that the interview need not long be continued. She caught it, she thought, but it did not really help. There was still this pressure of a flood of tears behind her eyes. She looked out of the window and exclaimed, "It's getting dark!" She said it peevishly, as if the sun's descent was the last piece of carelessness on the part of a negligent universe. And as her eye explored the dusk and saw that the bright spheres round the lamps were infested by wandering ghosts of wind-blown humidity she thought of her walk home up the Mound and what it would be like on this night of gusts and damp. "That puts the lid on!" her heart said bitterly, and the first tears oozed. Somehow she must go at once. She said thinly and quaveringly, "It's getting dark. Surely it's time I was away home?"

There was a clock on the mantelpiece which told it was not yet half-past four, but they both looked away from it. "Ay," said Mr. Mactavish James cheerfully, "you must run away home. I'll not have it said I drive a bairn to death with late hours. Good evening, lassie." He was so terrified by the intensity of her emotion that he had given up playing his fish. There stabbed a question through his heart. Had Isabella Kingan suffered thus?

"Good evening, Mr. James," she said brightly, and went out into the hall letting the door swing to, and pulled on her coat and tam-o'-shanter in the darkness. Now that it did not matter if she cried, she did not feel nearly so much like crying. "That's the way things always are," she snorted, and began to hum the Marseillaise defiantly as she buttoned up her coat. But though she was not seen here, she was not alone. There pressed against her the unexpungeable fact of her disgrace. Her eyes, mad with distress, with too much weeping, printed on the blackness the figure of the man with whom she had associated herself in this awful way by that idiot capering before the glass, by those maniac words. With rapture and horror she saw his dark-lidded eyes with their brilliant yet secretive gaze, the lips that were parted yet not loose, that his reserve would not permit to close lest by their setting strangers should see whether he was smiling or moody; she remembered the bluish bloom that had been on his chin the first night she ever saw him. At that she brought her clenched fist down on her other palm and sobbed with hate. He had brought all this upon her.

And hearing that, Mr. Mactavish James hobbled towards the door, purring endearments. He was better now. That anguished melody of speculation as to Isabella Kingan's heart he had played over again with the _tempo rubato_ and the pressed loud pedal of sentimentality, and it was now no more than agreeably affecting as a Scotch song ... being kind to the wean for the sake of her who was my sweethairt in auld lang syne....

She was so blind with hate of Yaverland that she was not aware of his presence till he bent over her, whinneying in the slow, complacent accents of Scottish sentiment, "Nelly, Nelly, what ails ye, lassie? Nothing's happened! I'll put it all right."

"Yes, of course nothing's happened!" she snapped, her hand on the doorknob. "Who said it had?" And then his words, "I'll put it all right," began to torment her. They threatened her that her disgrace was not to end here, that he might talk about it, that the thing might well be with her to her grave, that she had done for herself, that now and forever she had made her life not worth living. "Och, away with it!" she almost screamed. "You've driven me so that I don't know what I'm doing, you and your nasty wee black poodle of a son!"

He had to laugh. "Nelly, Nelly, he's as God made him!"

"Ye shelve your responsibility!" she said, and breaking immediately into the bitterest tears of this long day of weeping, flung out of the door of this loathed place, to which she remembered with agony as she ran down the stairs she must return to-morrow to earn her living.

III

More than anything else she hated people to see her when she had been crying, yet she was sorry that the little house was dark. And though she had seen, as she came in through the square, that there were no lights in any window, and though the sitting-room door was ajar, and showed a cold hearth and furniture looking huddled and low-spirited as furniture does when dusk comes and there is no company, she stood in the hall and called, "Mother! Mother!" She more than half remembered as she called that her mother had that morning said something about spending the afternoon with an old friend at Trinity. But she cried out again, "Mother! Mother!" and lest the cry should sound piteous sent it out angrily. There was no answer but the complaining rattle of a window at the top of the house, which, like all dwellings of the very poor, was perpetually ailing in its fitments; and, letting her wet things fall to her feet, she moved desolately into the kitchen. The gleam of the caddies along the mantelpiece, the handles that protruded like stiff tails over the saucepan-shelf above the sink, struck her as looking queer and amusing in this twilight, and then made her remember that she had had no lunch and was now very hungry, so she briskly set a light to the gas-ring and put on the kettle. She had the luck to find in the breadpan a loaf far newer than it was their thrifty habit to eat, and carried it back to the table, finding just such delicious pleasure in digging her fingers into its sides as she found in standing on her heels on new asphalt; but turned her head sharply on an invisible derider.

"I do mean to commit suicide, though I am getting my tea!" she snapped. "Indeed, I never meant to come home at all; I found myself running up the Mound from sheer force of habit. Did you never hear that human beings are creatures of habit? And now I'm here I might as well get myself something to eat. Besides, I'm not going shauchling down to the Dean Bridge in wet shoes either." She kicked them off and moved for a time with a certain conscious pomp, setting out the butter and the milk and the sugar with something of a sacramental air, and sometimes sobbing at the thought of how far the journey through the air would be after she had let go the Dean Bridge balustrade. But as she put her head into the larder to see if there was anything left in the pot of strawberry jam her hand happened on a bowl full of eggs. There was nothing, she had always thought, nicer to touch than an egg. It was cool without being chill, and took the warmth of one's hand flatteringly soon, as if it liked to do so, yet kept its freshness; it was smooth without being glossy, mat as a pearl, and as delightful to roll in the hand; and of an exquisite, alarming frangibility that gave it, in its small way, that flavour which belongs to pleasures that are dogged by the danger of a violent end. As elaborately as this she had felt about it; for she was silly, as poets are, and believed it possible that things can be common and precious too.

She held an egg against the vibrating place in her throat, and, shaken with silent weeping, thought how full of delights for the sight and the touch was this world she was going to leave. It also seemed to her that she could do very well with it as an addition to her tea. "Mother'll not grudge it me for my last meal on earth," she muttered mournfully, putting it in the kettle to save time. "And I ought to keep up my strength, for I must write a good-bye letter that will show people what they've lost...."

The egg was good; and as she would never eat another she cut her buttered bread into fingers and dipped them into the yolk, though she knew grown-up people never did it. The bread was good too. It was only because of all the things there are to eat this was a dreadful world to leave. She thought reluctantly of food; the different delicate textures of the nuts of meat that, lying in such snug unity within the crisp brown skin, make up a saddle of mutton; yellow country cream, whipped no more than makes it bland as forgiveness; little strawberries, red and moist as a pretty mouth; Scotch bun, dark and rich and romantic like the plays of Victor Hugo; all sorts of things nice to eat, and points of departure for the fancy. Even a potato roasted in its skin, if it was the right floury sort, had an entrancing, ethereal substance; one could imagine that thus a cirrus cloud might taste in the mouth. If the name were changed, angels might eat it. Potato plants were lovely, too.

Very vividly, for her mind's eye was staring wildly on the past rather than look on this present, which, with all the honesty of youth, she meant should have no future, there sprung up before her on the bare plastered wall a potato-field she and her mother had seen one day when they went to Cramond. Thousands and thousands of white flowers running up to a skyline in ruler-drawn lines. They had walked by the River Almond afterwards, linking arms, exclaiming together over the dark glassy water, which slid over small frequent weirs, the tents of green fire which the sun made of the overarching branches, the patches of moss that grew so symmetrically between the tree-trunks on the steep river-banks above the path that they might have been the dedicatory tablets of rustic altars. When the cool of the evening came they had sat and watched a wedding-party dance quadrilles on a lawn by the river, overhung by chestnut trees and severed by a clear and rapid channel, weedless as the air, from an island crowded by the weather-bleached ruins of a mill. The bride and bridegroom were not young, and the stiff movements with which they yet gladly led the dance, and the quiet, tired merriment of their middle-aged friends, gave the occasion a quality of its own; with which the faded purples of the loosestrife and mallows leaning out above the water on the white walls on the island were somehow in harmony. That was a day most happily full of things to notice. Surely this was a world to stay in, not to leave before one need! Ah, but it was now.

If to-morrow they started on such a walk the path by the river would be impassable by reason of the shadow of a tall, dark man that would fall across it, and she would not be able to sit and watch the dancers because in any moment of stillness she would be revisited by thoughts of the madness that had made her say those dreadful things, at the thought of which she laid her spread hand across her mouth, that had made her so rude to the good old man who was their only friend. Again she trembled with hate of Yaverland, a hate that seemed to swell out from her heart. She knew, as she would have known if a flame had destroyed her sight, that the turn life had taken had robbed her of the beauty of the world and was bringing her existence down to this ugly terminal focus, this moment when she sat in this cold kitchen, its cheap print and plaster the colour of uncleaned teeth, and tried to pluck up her energy to put on wet shoes and go through streets full of indifferent people and greased with foul weather to throw herself over a bridge on to rocks. She rose and felt for her shoes that she might go out to die....

Then at the door there came his knock. There was no doubt but that it was his knock. Who else in all the time that these two women had lived there had knocked so? Two loud, slow knocks, expectant of an immediate opening yet without fuss: the way men ask for things. Peace and apprehension mingled in her. She crossed her hands on her breast, sighed deeply, and cast down her head. It seemed good, as she went to the door and reluctantly turned the handle, that she was in her stockinged feet; her noiseless steps gave her a feeling of mischief and confidence as if there was to follow a game of pursuits and flights into a darkness.

His male breadth blocked the door. She smiled to see how huge he was, and stood obediently in the silence he evidently desired, for he neither greeted her nor made any movement to enter, but remained looking down into her face. His deep breath measured some long space of time. Her eyes wandered past him and to the little huddled houses, the laurels standing round the lamp, their leaves bobbing under the straight silver rake of the lamplit rain; and she marvelled that these things looked as they had always looked on any night.

"Come out, I want to see you," he whispered at last, and his hand closing on her drew her out of the dark hall. She liked the wetness of the flags under her stockinged feet, the fall of the rain on her face.

"You little thing! You little thing!" he muttered: and then, "I love you."

Her head drooped. She lifted it bravely.

"Ellen! Ellen!" He repeated the name in a passion of wonder, till, feeling the raindrops on her head, he exclaimed urgently, "But you're getting wet! Darling, let us go in."

When he had shut the front door and they were left alone in the dark, and she was free from the compulsion of his beauty and the intent gaze he had set on her face, she tried to seize her life's last chance of escape. She wrenched away her wrist and made a timid hostile noise. But he linked his arm in hers and whispered reassuringly, "I love you," and drew her, since there was a light there, into the kitchen. He put his hat down on the table beside her plate and cup and threw his wet coat across a chair, while she said querulously, sobbingly, "Why do you call me little? I am not little!"

He took her hands in his; her inky fingers were intertwined with his fingers, long and stained with strange stains, massive and powerful and yet tremulous. The sight and touch filled her with extraordinary joy and terror. At last things were beginning to happen to her, and she did not know if she had strength enough to support it. If she could have countermanded her destiny she would, although she knew from the rich colour that tinged this moment, in spite of her inadequacy, it was going to be of some high kind of glory.

He took her in his arms. His lips, brushing her ear, asked, "Do you love me? Tell me, tell me, do you love me?" Dreamily, incredulously, she listened to that strong heart-beat which she had imagined. But he pressed her. "Ellen, be kind! Tell me, do you love me?" That was cruel of him. She was not sure that she approved of love. The position of women being what it was. Men were tyrants, and they seemed to be able to make their wives ignoble. Married women were often anti-Suffragists; they were often fat; they never seemed to go out long walks in the hills or to write poetry. She laid her hands flat against his chest and pushed away from him. "No!" she whimpered. But he bent on her a face wolfish with a hunger that was nevertheless sweet-tempered, since it was beautifully written in the restraint which hung like a veil before his passion that he would argue only gently with her denial. And at the sight she knew his whisper, "Ellen, be kind, tell me that you love me," was such a call to her courage as the trumpet is to the soldier. She held up her head, and cried out, "I love you!" but was amazed to find that she too was whispering.

"Oh, you dear giving thing!" he murmured. "It is such charity of you to love me!" A tremor ran through his body, his embrace became a gentle tyranny. He was going to kiss her. But this she could not bear. She loved to lay her hand on the blue shadowed side of marble, she loved to see gleaming blocks of ice going through the streets in lorries, she loved the wind as it blows in the face of the traveller as he breasts the pass, she loved swift running and all austerity; and she had confused intimations that this that he wanted to do would in some deep way make war on these preferences. "Ah, no!" she whimpered. "I have told you that I love you. Why need you touch me? I can love you without touching you. Please ... please...."

Oh, if he wanted it he must have it. As she let her head fall back on her throat it came to her that though she had not known that she had ever thought of love, although she would have sworn that she had never thought of anything but getting on, there had been many nights when, between sleeping and waking, she had dreamed of this moment. It was going to be (his deep slow breath, gentle with amorousness, assured her) as she had then prefigured it; romantic as music heard across moonlit water, as a deep voice speaking Shakespeare, as rich colours spilt on marble when the sun sets behind cathedral windows; but warm as summer, soft as the south wind....

But this was pain. How could he call by the name of delight this hard, interminable, sucking pressure when it sent agony downwards from her mouth to the furthest cell of her body, changing her bones so that ever after they would be more brittle, her flesh so that it would be more subject to bruises! She did not suspect him of cruelty, for his arms still held her kindly, but her eyes filled with tears at the strangeness, which she felt would somehow work out to her disadvantage, of the world where people held wine and kisses to be pleasant things. Yet when the long kiss came to an end she was glad that he set another on her lips, for she had heard his deep sigh of delight. She would always let him kiss her as much as he liked, although she could not quite see what pleasure he found in it. Yet, could she not? Of course it was beautiful to be held close by Richard Yaverland! His substance was so dear, that his very warmth excited her tenderness and the rhythm of his breathing made wetness dwell about her lashes; it was most foolish that she should feel about this great oak-strong man as if he were a little helpless thing that could lie in the crook of her arm, like an ailing puppy; or perhaps a baby.

A pervading weakness fell on her; her arms, which had somehow become linked round his neck, were now as soft as garlands, her knees failed under her shivering body; but through her mind thundered grandiose convictions of new power. There was no sea, however black with chill and depth, in which she would not dive to save him, no desert whose unwatered sands she would not travel if so she served his need. It was as if already some brown arm had thrown a spear and she had flung herself before him and blissfully received the flying steel into her happy flesh. Love began to travel over her body, lighting here and there little fires of ecstasy, making her adore him with her skin as she had always adored him with her heart. And as the life of her nerves became more and more intense, her sensations more and more luminous, she became less conscious of her materiality. At the end she felt like a flash of lightning. From that moment she sank confused into the warm darkness of his embrace, while above her his voice muttered hesitant with solemnity: "Ellen ... you are the answer ... to everything...."

They drew apart and stood far off, looking into each other's eyes. The clock, ticking away time, seemed a curious toy. "You. In this little room. Oh, Ellen, it is a miracle," he said.

Pressing her hands together beneath her chin, she smiled.

"Ah, you are so beautiful! Your hair. Your eyes. The little white ball of your chin. As a matter of hard fact, you are more beautiful than I've ever imagined anybody else to be. The wildest lies I've ever told myself about the women I've wanted to love are true of you." For a moment he was still, thinking of Mariquita de Rojas as a swimmer might look down through fathoms of clear water on the face of a drowned woman. "But you ... you are beautiful as ... as an impersonal thing...." He clenched his fists in exasperation. All his life the one gift he had exercised easily and indubitably, not losing it even when his besetting despair stood between him and the sun, was the power to talk. While he was speaking the dominoes lay untouched on the greasy café table; men bent forward on their elbows that with his tongue he might make them companions of men who were half the world distant, maybe the whole world distant in their graves, that he might warm them with the beams of a sun long set on a horizon they would never see. That was vanity; or, more justly, the filling in of dangerously empty hours, holes in existence through which it seemed likely the soul might run out. But now, when it was absolutely necessary that he should tell her what she was to him, he could not talk at all. He stuttered on to try to win in the way he knew her generous heart could be won by a statement of her new joy.

"Ellen--you know what I mean? There's a particular kind of rapture that comes when you're looking at an impersonal thing. I mean a thing that doesn't amuse you, doesn't tickle up your greed or vanity, doesn't feed you. Like looking at the dawn. I feel like that when I look at you. And yet you are so sweet too. Oh, you dear Puritan, you will not like me to say you are like scent. But you are. Even at the feminine game you could beat all other women. You see, it is the loveliest thing in the world to watch women dancing; but with other women, when their bodies stop it's all over. They stand beside you showing minds that have never moved, that have been paralysed since they were babies. But when you stopped dancing your soul would go on dancing. Your mind has as neat ankles as your body. You are the treasure of this earth! Ellen, do you know that I am a little frightened? I do believe that love is a real magic."

He had fallen into that lecturer's manner she had noticed on the first night at the office, when he had told them about bullfights. Her heart pricked with pride because she perceived that now she was his subject.

"I have been up and down the world and I have seen no other real magic. I do not believe that in this age God has altered anyone. People love God nowadays as much as the temperaments they were born with tell them to. He has grown too old for miracles. After two thousand years he has no longer the force to turn water into wine. Ellen, I love your dear prim smile. But always, everywhere, I have found the love of men and women doing that. Sometimes the love of places does something very like it. A man may land on a strange island, and abandon the journey on which he set out, and the home he set out from, to live there for ever. But there his soul has just sunk to sleep. It hasn't been changed. But love changes people. I've seen the dirtiest little greasers clean themselves up and become capable of decency and courage, because there was some woman about. And oh, my darling! that happened with quite ordinary women. _Vin Ordinaire._ Pieces cut from the roll of ordinary female stuff. But how will the magic word act when you are part of the spell--you who are the most wonderful thing in the whole world, who are the flower of the earth's crop of beauty, who have such a genius for just being! Oh, it will be a tremendous thing."

He paused, marvelling at his own exultation, which marked, he knew, so great a change in him. For always before it had been his chief care that nothing at all should happen to him emotionally, and especially had he feared this alchemy of passion. He had been unable to pray for purity, since he felt it an ideal ridiculously not indigenous to this richly-coloured three-dimensional universe, and he had observed that it made men liable to infatuations in later life; but he had prayed for lust, which he knew to be the most drastic preventive of love. But it had evaded him as virtue evades other men. Never had he been able to look on women with the single eye of desire; always in the middle of his lust, like the dark stamen in a bright flower, there appeared his inveterate concern for people's souls. Every woman to whom he wanted to make love was certain to be engaged in some defensive struggle against fate, for that is the condition of strong personality, and his quick sense would soon detect its nature; and since there is nothing more lovable than the sight of a soul standing up against fate, looking so little under the dome of the indifferent sky, he would find himself nearly in love. And because that meant, as he had observed, this magic change of the self, he would turn his back on the adventure, for all his life he had disliked profound emotional processes with exactly the same revulsion that a decent man feels for some operation which, though within the law, is outside the dictates of honesty. He knew there was no reason that could be formulated why he should not become a real lover; but nevertheless he had always felt as if for him it would be an act of disloyalty to some fair standard.

He quaked at his own oddness, until there struck home to his heart, as an immense reassurance, the expression on Ellen's face. It had been blank with the joy of being loved, a romantic mask, lit steadily with a severe receptive passion; but the abstraction in his voice and an accompanying failure of invention in his compliments had not escaped unnoticed by her, and there was playing about her dear obstinate mouth and fierce-coloured eyebrows the most delicious look of shrewdness, as if she had his secret by the coat-tail and would deliver it up to justice; and over all there was the sweetest, most playful smile, which showed that she would make a jest of his negligence, that she was one of those who exclude ugliness from their lives by imposing beautiful interpretations on all that happened to her; and behind these lovely things she did shone the still lovelier thing she was. It struck home to him the immense degree to which brooding on so perfect and adventurous a thing would change him, and once more he was not afraid. Taking her again in his arms, he cried out: "Ellen! Ellen! You mean so much to me! I love you as a child loves its mother, partly for real, disinterested love and partly for the thing you give me! You are going to do such a lot for me! You will put an end to this damned misery! And just the sight of you about my home, you slip of light, you dear miracle!"

She put her hand across his mouth, blushing at the familiarity of her gesture yet urgently impelled to it. "That'll do," she said. "I know you think I'm nice. But what were you saying about being miserable? You're not miserable, are you?"

"Sometimes. I have been lately."

"You miserable!" she softly exclaimed. "You so big and strong--and victorious! But why?"

"Oh, no reason. It's a mood that comes on me."

"I have them myself. It's proof of our superior delicacy of organisation," she gravely told him.

"Oh, I don't know. The feeling that comes on you when you've taken particular care to turn up for an important appointment, and you get to the place ten minutes before the time, and find there's nobody there, and wait about, and suddenly find you've come a day late. And still you go on hanging round, feeling there must be something you can do, although you know you can't. It stays months sometimes. A sense of having missed some opportunity that won't come again. I don't know what it means. But it turns life sour. It seems to take the power out of one's fingers, to make one's brainstuff hot and thick and dark. It makes one's work seem not worth doing. But that's all over. It won't come again now I have you!" He sat down on the basket chair and drew her on to his knee, giving her light caresses to correct the heavy things he had just been saying. She received them abstractedly, as if she were thinking silent vows. "Ellen, I don't know what your eyes are like. The sea never looks kind like that, and they are wittier than flowers. You're not really like a flower at all, you know, though I believe that in our circumstances it's considered the proper thing for me to tell you that you are. You're too important, and you wouldn't like growing in a garden, which even wild flowers seem to want to do. I'll tell you what you're like. You're like an olive tree. They're slim like you, and their branches go up like arms, as if they were asking for a vote, and they grow dangerously (just as you would if you were a tree) on the very edge of cliffs; and one looks past them at the blue sea, just as I look past you at the glorious life I'm going to have now I've got you. Dearest, when can we get married?"

"Oh!" exclaimed Ellen, greatly pleased. "Are you in a position to keep a wife?"

He burst out laughing. "You darling! Do you know, I believe I could keep two."

She did not laugh. "It's wicked to think that if you did I couldn't divorce you. You'd have to be cruel as well. I heard Brynhild Ormiston say so."

He went on laughing. "Well, don't let that hold you back. I dare say I could, rise to being cruel as well. Let's look on the bright side of things. Tell me, darling, when will you marry me?"

"Those iniquitous marriage-laws," she murmured. "It makes one think...." She looked down, weighing grave things.

"My dearest, you can forget the marriage-laws. I will adore you so, I will be so faithful, I will work my fingers to the bone so gladly to make you kind to me, that there is no divorce law in the world will let you get rid of me." Shy at his own sincerity, he kissed her hair, and whispered in her ear, "I mean it, Ellen."

She raised her head with that bravery he loved so much, and gave him her lips to kiss, but her eyes were still wide and set with reluctance.

"What can be worrying her?" he wondered. "Can it be that she isn't sure about my money? Of course she hasn't the least idea how much I've got. Wise little thing, if she dreads transplantation to some little hole worse than this." He looked distastefully at the age-cracked walls, stained with patches of damp that seemed like a material form of disgrace. That she should have grown to beauty in these infect surroundings made him feel, as he had often done before, that she was not all human and corruptible, but that her flesh was mixed with precious substance not subject to decay, her blood interpenetrated with the material of jewels. Perhaps some sorcerer had confusioned it of organic and inorganic beauty and chosen some ancestress of Ellen for his human ingredient; he remembered an African story of a woman fertilised by a sacred horn of ivory; an Indian story of a princess who had lain with her narrow brown body straight and still all night before the altar of a quiet temple, that the rays of a holy ruby might make her quick; surely their children had met and bred the stock that had at last, in the wise age of the world, made this thing of rubies and ivory that lay in his arms. He liked making fantasies about her that were stiff as brocade with fantastic imagery, that were more worshipful of her loveliness than anything he yet dared say to her. Absent-mindedly he went on reassuring her. "You know, I've got quite enough money. Fortunately the branch of chemistry I'm interested in is of great commercial use, so I get well paid. Iniquitously well paid, when one considers how badly pure scientific work is paid; and of course pure science ought to be rewarded a hundred times better than applied science. We ought to be able to manage quite decently. My mother's got her own money, so my income will be all ours. There's no reason of that sort why we shouldn't get married at once. We'll have to live in Essex at first. I've got to go and work on Kerith Island."

She wriggled on his lap. "What's that you were saying about science?" she asked, her voice dipping and soaring with affected interest. "Why isn't pure science to be rewarded better than applied science?"

"Why is she trying to put me off?" he speculated. "It isn't a matter of being sure of a decent home. In fact, she hated my talking about money. I wonder what it is." To let her do what she wanted with the conversation he said aloud, "Oh, because applied science is a mug's game. Pure science is a kind of marriage with knowledge--the same kind of marriage that ours is going to be, when you find out all about a person by being with them all the time and loving them very much. Applied science is the other sort of marriage. In it you go through the pockets of knowledge when he's asleep and take out what you want. But, dear, I don't want to talk of that. I want to know when you're going to marry me."

"I hope," she said quaveringly, "that all your people won't think I am marrying you for your money. But then ... if they know you ... they will know that you are so glorious ... that any woman would marry you ... if you were a beggar, or the ideal equivalent of that."

"Oh, you dear absurd thing!" he cried, feeling intensely moved. "Haven't you the least idea how far beyond price you are, how worthless I am! Anyway ... I've no people, except my mother." He paused and wondered if he would tell her about his mother now; but seeing that her brows were still knitted by her private trouble about their marriage, the nature of which he could not guess, he thought he would not do it just now. In any case, he did not want to. "And she will know how lucky I am to get you, how little I deserve you."

"I'd have married you," said Ellen, not without bitterness, "if you'd been an anti-Suffragist." The situation was so plainly presenting itself to her as being in some way dreadful that he anxiously held her with his eyes. She stammered, folding and refolding her hands. "It'll be queer, living in a house with you, won't it?"

He had held her eyes, and thus forced her to tell him what was troubling her, on the assumption that he could deal with her answer. But this was outside his experience. He did not know anything about girls; he had hardly believed in the positive reality of girlhood; it had seemed to him rather a negative thing, the state of not being a woman. But in the light of her gentle, palpitant distress, he saw that it was indeed so real a state that passing from it to the state of womanhood would be as terrible as if she had to give birth to herself.... It was such a helpless state, too. She was, he said to himself again--for he knew she did not like him to say it!--such a little thing. He remembered, with a sudden sweat of horror, the conversation in the lawyer's office that had sent him sweating up here, keeping himself so hot with curses at the human world that he had not felt the coldness of the weather. God, how he had hated that office from the moment he set foot in it! He had hated Mr. Mactavish James at sight as much as he had hated his young son; for the solicitor had surveyed him with that lewd look that old men sometimes give to strong young men. He had perceived at once, from the way Mr. James was sucking the occasion, that he had been sent for some special purpose, and he did not believe, from the repetition of that lewd look, that it related to his property in Rio or that it was clean. He was prepared for the drawled comment, "I hear ye're making fren's wi' our wee Nelly," and he was ready with a hard stare. It was enraging to see that the old man had expected his haughtiness and that it was evidently fuel for his lewd jest. "I am fond of wee Nelly. She's just a world's wonder. You sit there saying nothing, maybe it doesn't interest you, but you would feel as I do if you had seen her the way I did thon day a year ago in June. Ay!" He threw his eyes up and exclaimed succulently, "The wee bairn!" with an air of giving a handsome present.

Yaverland, who had not come much in contact with Scotch sentimentality, felt very sick, and increasingly so as the old man told how he had met her up at the Sheriff's Court. "Sixteen, and making her appearance in the Sheriff's Court!" Yaverland had a vision of a court of obscure old men all gloating impotently and imaginatively on Ellen's red and white. "What was she doing there?" he asked in exasperation, forgetting his vow to appear indifferent about Ellen, and was enraged to see Mr. Mactavish James chuckle at the perceived implications of his interested enquiry. "Well, it was this way. Her mither, who was Ellen Forbes, whom I knew well when I was young, had the wee house in Hume Park Square. You'll have been there? Hev' ye not? Imphm. I thought so. Well, they'd had thought difficulty in paying the rent...." The story droned on perpetually, breaking off into croonings of sensual pity; and Yaverland sat listening to it with such rage, that, as he soon knew from the narrator's waggish look, the vein in his forehead began to swell.

It appeared that the poor little draggled bird had in the summer of its days been known as Ellen Forbes had got into arrears with the rent; as some cheque had been greatly delayed, and that when the cheque had arrived she had been taken away to the fever hospital with typhoid fever, and that, since she had to lie on her back for three weeks, Ellen, who was left alone in that wee house--he rolled his tongue round the loneliness repellently--had neither sent the cheque on to her nor asked her to write a cheque for the rent. The landlord, "a man called Inglis, wi' offices up in Clark Street, who does a deal of that class of property"--it was evident that he admired such--saw a prospect of getting tenants to take on the house at a higher rental. So, "knowing well that Ellen was a wean and no' kenning what manner of wean she was," and hearing from some source that they were exceptionally friendless and alone, served her with a notice that he was about to apply for an eviction order. But Ellen had attended the court and told her story.

"By the greatest luck in the world I happened to be in court that day, looking after the interests of a client of mine, a most respectable unmarried lady, a pillar of St. Giles, who had been horrified to find out that her property was being used as a bad house. Hee hee." He was abashed to perceive that this young man was not overcome with mirth and geniality at the mention of a brothel. "The minute I saw the wee thing standing there in the well of the court, saying what was what--she called him 'the man Inglis,' she did!--I kenned there was not her like under the sun." She had won her case; but Mr. James had intercepted her on the way out, and had stopped her to congratulate her, and had been amazed to find the tears running down her cheeks. "I took the wee thing aside." It turned out that to defend her home, and keep it ready for her mother coming out from the hospital, she had to come down to the court on the very day that she should have sat for the examination by which she had hoped to win a University scholarship. "The wee thing was that keen on her buiks!" he said, with caressing contempt, "and she was like to cry her heart out. So I put it all right." "What did you do?" Yaverland had asked, expecting to hear of some generous offer to pay her fees, and remembering that he had heard that the Scotch were passionate about affairs of education. "I offered her a situation as typist here, as my typist had just left," said Mr. Mactavish James, with an ineffable air of self-satisfaction. Yaverland had been about to burst into angry laughter, when the old man had gone on, "Ay, and I thought I had found a nest for the wee lassie. But a face as bonnie as hers brings its troubles with it! Ay, ay! I'm sorry to have to say it."

Oh! it went slower and smoother like a dragged-out song at a ballad concert. "There's one in the office will not leave the puir lassie alone...." Yaverland had fumed with rage at the idea; and then had been overcome with a greater loathing of this false and theatrical old man. Inglis and the man who wanted her were at least slaves of some passion that was the fruit of their affairs. But this man was both of them. He had not wished this girl well. He had rejoiced in her poverty because it stimulated the flow of the juices of pity; he had rejoiced in her disappointment; he had rejoiced in Inglis's villainy because he could pity her; he had rejoiced in the unknown man's lust because he could step protectively in front of Ellen; and, worse than this, hadn't he savoured in the story vices that he himself had had to sacrifice for the sake of standing well with the world? Had he not felt how lovely it must be to be Inglis and hunt little weak slips of girls and make more money? Had he not felt himself revisited by the warm fires of lust in thinking of this unknown man's pursuit of Ellen and wallowed in it? Yaverland had risen quickly, and said haltingly, trying to speak and not to strike because the man was old and his offence indefinite. "No doubt you've been very good to Miss Melville." Mr. Mactavish James had been amazed by the grim construction of the speech, the lack of any response matching his "crack" in floridity. He had expected comment on his generosity. Positive resentment had stolen into his face as Yaverland had turned his back on him and rushed up the wet streets to rescue Ellen from the world.

Alas, that it should turn out that he too was something from which her delicate little soul asked to be rescued! He could not bear the thought of altering her. The prospect of taking her as his wife, of making her live in close contact with his masculinity, dangerous both in its primitive sense of something vast and rough, and also as something more experienced than her, seemed as iniquitous as the trampling of some fine white wild flower. But then, she was beautiful, not only lovely: destiny had marked her for a high career; to leave her as she was would be to miscast one who deserved to play the great tragic part, which cannot be played without the actress's heart beating at the prospect of so great a rôle. Oh, there was no going back! But he perceived he must be very clever about it. He must make it all as easy as possible for her. His heart contracted with tenderness as he took vows that could not have been more religious if they had been made concerning celibacy instead of concerning marriage. He regretted he was an Atheist. He had felt this before in moments of urgency, for blasphemy abhors a vacuum, but now he wanted some white high thing to swear by; something armed with powers of eternal punishment to chastise him if he broke his oath. He found that his eyes were swimming with tears. Yes, tears! Oh, she had extended life to limits he had not dreamed of! He had never thought he would laugh out loud as he had done to-night. He had never thought his eyes would grow wet as they were doing now. And it was good. He looked at her in gratitude, and found her looking at him.

"Fancy you being miserable! And me," she reproached herself, "thinking that everybody was happy but myself! Dear...." She rose to it, walking down to the cold water. "Let's marry soon."

The sequence of thought was to be followed easily. She was willing to take this step, which for reasons she did not understand made her flesh goose-grained with horror, because she thought she could prevent him from being unhappy. "Oh, Ellen!" he cried out, and buried his head on her bosom. "I want--I want to deserve you. I will work all my life to be good enough for you." He felt the happiness of a man who has found a religion.

They heard a key turning in the front door. Ellen slipped off his knee and stood, first one foot behind the other, balanced on the ball of one foot, a finger to her lips, in the attitude of a frightened nymph. Then she recovered herself, and stood sturdily on both feet with her hands behind her. How he adored her, this nymph who wanted to look like Mr. Gladstone!

Mrs. Melville, pitifully blown about, a most ruffled little bird, appeared at the door. She was amazed. "Mr. Yaverland! In the kitchen! And, Ellen, what are you doing in your stocking feet? Away and take Mr. Yaverland into the parlour!"

"He came in here himself," said Ellen. She had become a little girl, a guilty little girl.

Yaverland caught Mrs. Melville's eye and held it for a fraction of an instant. She mustn't know they had talked of it before. That would never do, for a modern woman. "Mrs. Melville," he said, "I've asked Ellen to marry me."

Her eyes twinkled. "You never say so!" she said, with exquisite malice at the expense of her clever daughter. "I am surprised!" She sat down at the head of the kitchen table, setting a string bag full of parcels on the table in front of her. She was breathing heavily, and her voice, he noticed, was very hoarse. Poor little thing! Yet she was glad. Wonderful to see her so glad about anything; pathetic to see how, though all her life had gone shipwrecked, she cheered her daughter to voyage. "She must live near us in Essex," he thought rapidly. "I must give her a decent allowance." "Well, well!" she said happily.

Ellen, feeling that things were being taken too much for granted, so far as she was concerned, remarked suddenly, "And I think I'll take him."

Her eyes twinkled again at Yaverland. Wasn't there something very sweet about her? She was, in effect, glad that he loved her daughter, because now she had somebody who could laugh at this wonderful daughter!

"Let me marry her soon," he said.

She became doubtful. Her face contracted, as it had done when she had said, "Let her bide; she's only a bairn."

"We must live in Essex," he said, to get her past the moment.

She became tragic.

"You'd like, I think, to come and live near us? If there isn't a house at Roothing, there are plenty at Prittlebay. It would be good for you. Obviously you can't stand this climate."

She looked up at him and said, the thought of them living together having obviously presented itself to her for the first time, "Ah, well. I hope you'll both be happy. Happier than I was." She receded back into memory, and found first of all that ancient loyalty that she had always practised in his life. "Not but what John Melville was a better man than anyone has allowed."

They didn't say anything, but stood silent, giving the moment its honour. Then Ellen stepped to her mother's side and said chidingly, "Mother, what's wrong with your throat? You had a cold when you went out, but nothing like this. It's terrible."

"It's nothing, dear. Take Mr. Yaverland--maircy me, what shall I call you now?"

"Richard. That's what my mother calls me."

"Oh," she cried flutteringly, "it's like having a son again. No one would think I was your mother, though, and you such a great thing! Though Ronnie if he had lived would have been tall. As tall as you, I wouldn't wonder," she said, with a tinge of jealousy. "Well, Ellen, take Richard into the parlour and light the fire. I'll see to the supper."

"You will not," said Ellen, whom shyness was making deliriously surly. It was like seeing her in a false beard. "R--Richard, will you take her into the parlour yourself? She's got a terrible throat. Can you not hear?"

"Ellen dear!"

"Away now!"

"I will not away. Ellen, don't worry. You don't know where I put the best tablecloth after the mending--and there's nothing but cod-roes, and you know well that in cooking your mother beats you. Run away, dear--you'll make Richard feel awkward--"

Ellen shrugged her shoulders. She knew that she ought to insist, but she knew too that it would be lovely lighting the fire for Richard.

IV

He had not been able to see Ellen for three days. But he had written to her three times.

_"I'm missing another day of you, Ellen. And I'm greedy for every minute of you. There you are, away from me, and moving about and doing all the sweet things you do, and saying all the things you do say, and your red hair catching the light and your voice full of exquisite sweet sounds, and I just have to get along seeing and hearing nothing of it. I am the most insatiable of lovers. Life is thirst without you. I grudge every moment we have been alive on the same world and not together. What a waste! What a waste! I've never wanted an immortal soul before, but now I do--that I may go on with you and go on with you, you darlingissima, you endlessly lovely human thing. I'd go through all the ages with you; we'd be like two children reading a wonderful book together, and you'd light even the darkest passage of time for me with your wit and your beauty. Tell me everything you are doing, tell me every little thing, my lovely red-haired Ellen...."_

And she had written to him twice....

_"And in the evening I went out shopping. I wish you would tell me what you like to eat. It would give shopping an interest. Then I went to the library and got a trashy novel for mother to read, as I am still keeping her in bed. For myself, I wanted to read something about love, as hitherto I have not taken much interest in it and have read practically nothing on the subject, so I got out the works of Shelley and Byron. But their love poems are very superficial. I do wish you were here. Please come soon. When mother is well I will be able to make cakes for you. Did you see the sunset yesterday? I am surprised to find how much feeling there is arising out of what is, after all, quite an ordinary event of life. For after all, this happens to nearly everybody. But I do not believe it can happen quite like this to other people. I am sure there must be something quite out of the ordinary about our feelings for one another. Do please come soon...."_

Well, he had come, his arms full of flowers and illustrated papers for the invalid, and neither his soft first knock, designed to spare Mrs. Melville's susceptibilities, nor his more vigorous second, had brought Ellen to the door. He stepped back some paces and looked up at the three dwarfish storeys of the silent little house, and alarm fell on him as he saw that all the windows were dark. The reasoning portion of his mind deliberated whether there could conceivably be any bedrooms looking out to the back, but with the crazed imagination of a lover he saw extravagant visions of the evils that might befall two fragile women living alone. He pictured Ellen sitting up in bed, blinking at the lanterns of masked men. Then it struck him as probable that Mrs. Melville's sore throat might have developed into diphtheria, and that Ellen had caught it, and the two women were even now lying helpless and unattended in the dark house, and he brought down the knocker on the door like a hammer. The little square, which a moment ago had seemed an amusing setting for Ellen's quaintness, now seemed like a malignant hunchback in its darkness and its leaning angles, and the branches of the trees in the park beyond the railings swayed in the easy wind of a fine night with that ironical air nature always assumes to persons convulsed by human passion. But presently he heard the crazy staircase creak under somebody's feet, and the next moment Ellen's face looked out at him. She held a candle in her hand, and in its light he saw that her face was marked with fatigue as by a blow and that her hair fell in lank, curved strands about her shoulders.

She nearly sobbed when she saw him, but opened the door no wider than a crack. "Oh, Richard! It's lovely to see you, but you mustn't come in. They've taken poor mother away to the fever hospital with diphtheria."

"Diphtheria!" he exclaimed. "That's rum! It flashed through my mind as I knocked that it was diphtheria she had."

"Isn't that curious!" she murmured, her eyes growing large and soft with wonder. But her rationalism asserted itself and her glance grew shrewd again. "Of course that's all nonsense. What more likely for you to think, when you knew it was her throat that ailed her?" Seeing that in her enthusiasm for a materialist conception of the universe she loosed her grip of the doorhandle, he pushed past her, and took her candlestick away from her and set it down with his flowers and papers on the staircase. "Oh, you mustn't, you mustn't!" she cried under his kisses. "Do you not know it's catching? I may have it on me now."

"Oh, God, I hope you haven't, you precious thing...."

"I don't expect so. I've had an anti-diphtheritic serum injected. Science is a wonderful thing. But you might get it."

"That be damned."

"Och, you great swearing thing!" she crooned delightedly, and nuzzled into his chest. "Ah, how I like you to like kissing me!" she whispered in a woman's voice. "More than I like it myself. Is that not strange?" Then her face puckered and she was young again, hardly less young than any new-born thing "It's a mild case, the doctor said, but it hurt her so! And oh, Richard, when the ambulance man carried her away she looked so wee!"

"Why did you let her go?" he asked with sudden impatience. He loved her so much that her swimming eyes turned a knife in his heart, and his maleness resented the pain her female sensitiveness was bringing on him, and wanted to prove that all this could have been avoided by the use of the male attribute of common sense, and therefore she deserved no sympathy at all. "I would have stood you nurses. I'm one of the family now. You might have let me do that!"

"Dear, I thought of asking you for that," she said timidly, "but, you see, nurses are ill to deal with in a wee house like this where there's no servant. If I had sickened for it myself where would we all have been? Worse than in the hospital." Of course she had been wise; it was her constant quality. He shook with rage at the thought of the extreme poverty of the poor, whom the world pretends are robbed only of luxury but who are denied such necessities as the right to watch beside the beloved sick. "But I've been reckless!" she boasted with a smile. "I've told them to put her in a private ward. She was so pleased! She was six weeks in the general ward when she had typhoid, and it was dreadful, all the women from the Canongate and the Pleasance...." It brought painful tears to his eyes to hear this queen, who ought to have had first call on the world's riches, rejoicing because by a stroke of good fortune her mother need not lie in her sickness side by side with women of the slums. "Oh, my dear, I'm so glad I can look after you!" he muttered, and gathered her closely to him.

"Oh dear, and me in my dressing-gown!" she breathed.

"You look very beautiful."

"I wasn't thinking of beauty; I was thinking of decency."

"Nobody would call a dressing-gown of grey flannel fastened at the neck with a large horn button anything but decent."

"Yes, it's cairtainly sober," said Ellen placidly. "Beauty, indeed! I'm past thinking of beauty, after having been up all night giving mother her medicine and encouraging her, and getting her ready in the morning for the ambulance, and going away over to the doctor at Church Hill for my injection this afternoon. I fear to think what I'm looking like, though doubtless it would do me good to know."

"You must be tired out. Run along to bed. I'll go away now and come back the first thing in the morning."

"Who's talking of bed?" she complained with a smiling peevishness. ("Ye've got--ye've got remarkable eyebrows. The way they grow makes me feel all--all desperate.") "I've had a lie-down since four. You woke me up with your knocking. Dear, I've never been woken up so beautifully before. Now I want my supper. I never lose my appetite even when the Liberals win a by-election, which considering the way our women work against them is one of those things that disprove all idea of a just Providence. Dear, but it'll be such a poor supper to set before you! There's not a thing in the house but a tin of salmon. It is a mercy that mother isn't here, for this is the kind of thing that upsets her terribly. She wakes me up sometimes dreaming of the time the milk was sour when Mr. Kelman came on his parish visit, though that's five years ago now. Oh, Richard, mother is such a wee sensitive thing, you cannot think! I cannot bear her to be ill! But indeed she is not very ill. The doctor said she was not very ill. He said I would be a fule to worry. She would be at me for letting you stand out in the hall like this. You go into the parlour. I'll light the fire, and then I'll away to the kitchen and get the supper. We must just make the best of it, and I have heard that some people prefer tinned salmon to fresh."

"It's the distinguishing mark of connoisseurs in all the capitals of Europe," said Richard. "But darling, don't light a fire for me. I'll go off as soon as you've had supper, so that you can turn in."

"But as soon as supper's eaten I have to away out. Ah, will you come with me? I like walking through the streets with you. It's somehow like a procession. You're awful like a king, Richard. Not the present Royal Family."

"But why must you go out?"

"To see how mother is. Do you not know? When the ambulance men come they give you a number. Mother's is ninety-three. Then every morning and every evening they put a board in the window up at the Public Health Office in the High Street, with headings on it: 'Very dangerously ill, friends requested to come at once.' 'Very ill, but no immediate danger,' 'Getting on well,' and the numbers grouped against them. She'll be amongst the 'Getting on wells.' The doctor said there was no cause for worry at all. He is a splendid doctor."

"But, my God, can't you telephone?"

"No, of course not. They can't do that in these institutions. They'd have to keep someone to do nothing but answer the telephone all day. But it doesn't really matter. Hardly anybody dies of fevers, do they? I never heard of anybody dying of diphtheria, did you? They used to in the old days, but it's all different now. This serum's such a wonderful thing. But they did hurt so when they injected it. She cried, although she is awful brave as a usual thing. Oh, let's get on with this supper!" She passed into the kitchen and began preparations for a meal, banging down the saucepans, while he brought in his gifts and laid them on the table. "I'm taking it for granted that you like your cocoa done with milk. What's all this? Oh, did you bring those flowers for her? Oh, that was kind of you! Pink flowers, too, and she loves pink. It's her great grief that all her life she wanted a pink dress, and what with one thing and another, first having a younger sister so sallow that a pink dress in the neighbourhood spoilt all her chances, and afterwards father just wincing if there seemed any chance of her having anything she liked, she never got one. Illustrated papers, too! She likes a read, though nothing intellectual. Richard, I do believe you're thoughtful. That'll be a great help in our married life." She turned over the glossy pages, clicking her tongue with disapproval. "Anti-Suffragists to a woman, I expect," adding honestly, "but pairfect teeth."

Her little face, seen now in repose, unlit by the light that glowed in her eyes when she looked at him, was piteous with fatigue. "Ellen, can't I go and look at this board?"

"No. I want to go myself."

"Then come and do it now, and then we'll go on and have supper at some place in Princes Street."

"No. I want to leave it as late as possible. Then it'll seem like saying good-night to Mother."

They ate but little. She tasted a few mouthfuls, and then clambered on to his knee and lay in his arms, burying her face against his shoulder. She might have been asleep but that she sometimes put up her hand and stroked his hair and traced his eyebrows and made a little purring noise; and once she cried a little and exclaimed pettishly, "It's just lack of sleep. I'm not anxious. I'm not a bit anxious." And presently she looked up at the alarum clock and said, "That's never nine? We must go. Richard, you are great company!" She ran upstairs to dress, singing in the sweetest little voice, wild yet low and docile, such as a bird might have if it were christened. When she came down she faced him with gentle defiance and said, "I know I'm awful plain to-night. I suppose you'll not love me any more?" He answered, "Be downright ugly if you can. It won't matter to me. I love you anyhow." She lifted her hand to turn out the gas and smiled at him over her shoulder. "If that's not handsome!" she drawled mockingly, but in her glance, though she dropped her lids, there burned a flame of earnestness, and just as he was going to open the front door she slipped into his arms and rested there, shaken with some deep emotion, with words she felt too young to say.

"What is it? What is it you want to say? Tell me."

"Do you think we can do it, Richard? Love each other always. Now, it's easy. We're young. It's easier to be nice when you're young.... But mother and father must have cared for each other once. She kept his letters. After everything she kept his letters.... It's when one gets old ... old people quarrel and are mean. Ah, do you think we will be able to keep it up?"

She was remembering, he could see, the later married life of her parents, and conceiving it for the first time not with the harsh Puritan moral vision of the young, as the inevitable result of deliberate ill-conduct, but as the decay of an intention for which the persons involved were hardly more to blame than is an industrious gardener for the death of a plant whose habit he has not understood. It was, to one newly possessed of happiness, a terrifying conception.

He muttered, low-voiced and ashamed as those are who speak of things much more sacred than the common tenor of their lives: "Of course it'll be difficult after the first few years. But it's hard to be a saint. Yet there have been saints. All that they do for their religion I'll do for you. I will keep clear of evil things lest they spoil the feelings I have for you. I.... There are thoughts like prayers.... And, darling ... I do not believe in God ... yet I know that through you I shall find ... something the same as God...." He could not say it all. But it communicated itself in their long unpassionate kiss.

They crept out of the dark house that had heard them as out of a church. He was very happy as they went through the high, wide streets that to-night were broad rivers of slow wind. He was being of use to her; she was leaning on his arm and sometimes shutting her tired eyes and trusting to his guidance. The very coldness of the air he found pleasing, because it told him that he was in the North, the cruel-kind region of the world which sows seeds from the South in ice-bound earth in which it would seem that they must perish, yet rears them to such fruit and flower as in their own rich soil they never knew.

At the first, he reflected, it must have appeared that the faith they made in Rome would lose all its justifications of beauty when it travelled to those barren lands where the Holy Wafer and the images of Our Lord and Our Lady must be content with a lodging built not of coloured marble but of grey stone. Yet here the Northmen won. Since there were no quarries of coloured marble they had to quarry in their minds, and there they found the Gothic style, which made every church like the holiest moment of a holy soul's aspiration to God, and which is doubtless more pleasing to Him, if He exists to be pleased, than precious stones.

So was it with love. A man returning from the South, where all women are full of physical wisdom, might think as he looked on these Northern women, with their straight sexless eyes and their long limbs innocent of languor, that he had turned his back on love. But here again the North was victor. Since these women could not be wise about life with their bodies, they were wise about love with their souls. They can give such sacramental kisses as the one that still lay on his lips, committing him for ever to nobility. Ah, how much she had done for him by being so sweetly militarist! For it had always been his fear that the supreme passion of his life would be for some woman who, by her passivity, would provoke him to develop those tyrannous and brutish qualities which he had inherited from his father. He had seen that that might easily happen during his affair with Mariquita de Rojas; in those years he had been, he knew, more quarrelsome and less friendly to mild and civilising things than he was ordinarily. But henceforward he was safe, for Ellen would fiercely forbid him to be anything but gentle. Now that he realised how good their relationship was he wanted it to be perfect, and therefore he felt vexed that he had not yet made it perfectly honest by telling her about his mother. He resolved to do so there and then, for he felt that that kiss had sealed the evening to a serenity in which pain surely could not live.

"You're walking slower than you were," said Ellen sharply. "What was it you were thinking of saying?"

He answered slowly, "I was thinking of something that I ought to tell you about myself."

She looked sideways at him as they passed under a lamp, and wrote in her heart, "When the vein stands out in the middle of his forehead I will know that he is worried," then said aloud, "Och, if it's anything disagreeable, don't bother to tell me. I'll just take it for granted that till you met me you were a bad character."

"It's nothing that I've done. It's something that was done to my mother and myself." He found that after all he could not bear to speak of it, and began to hurry on, saying loudly, "Oh, it doesn't matter! You poor little thing, why should I bother you when you're dog-tired with an old story that can't affect us in the least! It's all over; it's done with. We've got our own lives to lead, thank God!"

She would not let him hurry on. "What was it, Richard?" she insisted, and added timidly, "I see I'm vexing you, but I know well it's something that you ought to tell me!"

He walked on a pace or two, staring at the pavement. "Ellen, I'm illegitimate." She said nothing, and he exclaimed to himself, "Oh, God, it's ten to one that the poor child can't make head or tail of it! She probably knows nothing, absolutely nothing about these things!" Into his deep concern lest he had troubled the clear waters of her innocence there was creeping unaccountably a feeling of irritation, which made him want to shout at her. But he mumbled, "My father and mother weren't married to each other...."

"Yes, I understand," she said rather indignantly; and after a moment's silence remarked conversationally, "So that's all, is it?" Then her hand gripped his and she cried, "Oh, Richard, when you were wee, did the others twit you with it?"

Oh, God, was she going to take it sentimentally? "No. At least, when they did I hammered them. But it was awful for my mother."

"Ah, poor thing," she murmured, "isn't it a shame! Mrs. Ormiston is always very strong on the unmarried mother in her speeches."

He had a sudden furious vision of how glibly these women at the Suffrage meeting would have talked of Marion's case and how utterly incapable they would have been to conceive its tragedy; how that abominable woman in sky-blue would have spoken gloatingly of man's sensuality while she herself was bloomed over with the sensual passivity that provokes men to cruel and extravagant demands. That nobody but himself ever seemed to have one inkling of the cruelty of her fate he took as evidence that everybody was tacitly in league with the forces that had worked towards it, and he found himself unable to exempt Ellen from this suspicion. If she began to chatter about Marion, if she talked about her without that solemnity which should visit the lips of those who talk of martyred saints, there would begin a battle between his loves, the issue of which was not known to him. He said with some exasperation: "I'm not talking of _the_ unmarried mother; I am talking of my mother, who was not married to my father...."

But she did not hear him. The news, though it had roused that high pitch of trembling apprehension which it now knew at any mention of the sequel of love, had not shocked her. In order to feel that quick reaction of physical loathing to the story of an irregular relationship before hearing its details, which is known as being shocked, one must be either not quite innocent and have ugly associations with sex, or have had reason to conceive woman's life as a market where there are few buyers, and a woman who is willing to live with a lover outside marriage as a merchant who undersells her competitors; and Ellen was innocent and undefeated. It seemed to her, indeed, just such a story as she might have expected to hear about his birth. It was natural that to find so wonderful a child one would have to go to the end of the earth. There appeared before her mind's eye a very bright and clean picture, perhaps the frontispiece of some forgotten book read in her childhood, which represented a peasant girl clambering on to a ledge half-way up a cliff and holding back a thorny branch to look down on a baby that, clad in a little shirt, lay crowing and kicking in a huge bird's nest. She wondered what manner of woman it was that had so recklessly gone forth and found this world's wonder. "What is your mother like? Tell me, what is she like?"

"What is she like?" he repeated stiffly. He was not quite sure that she was asking in the right spirit, that she was not moved by such curiosity as makes people study the photographs of murdered people in the Sunday papers. "She is very beautiful...." But he should not have said that. Now when he brought Ellen to Marion he would hear her say to herself, as tourists do when they see a Leonardo da Vinci, "Well, that's not my idea of beauty, I must say!" and he would stop loving her. But Ellen was saying, "I thought she would be. You know, Richard, you are quite uncommon-looking. But tell me, what is she like?" Of course he might have known she was trying to get at the story. He had better tell her at once, so that he was not vexed by these anglings. He dragged it out of himself. "She was young, very young. My father was the squire of the Essex village that is our home...." It was useless. He could not tell her of that tragedy. How black a tragedy it was! How, it existing, he could be so crass as to eat and drink and be merry with love? He turned his face away from Ellen and wished her arm was not in his, yet felt himself bound to go on with his story lest she might make a vulgar reading of the facts and imagine that his mother had given herself to his father without being married for sheer easiness. "They could not marry because he had a wife. They loved each other very much. At least, on her side it was love! On his ... on _his_...."

"Ah, hush!" she said. She gripped his arm and he felt that she was trembling violently. "Dear, the way you're speaking of it ... somehow it's making it happen all over again...."

This was strange. He looked down on her with sudden respect. For she was using almost the same words that his mother had spoken often enough when he had sat beside her bed on those nights when she could not sleep for the argument of phantom passions in her room, and she opened her eyes suddenly after having lain with them closed for a time, and found him grieving for her. "Dear, you must not be so sorry for me. Hold my hand, but do not feel too sorry for me. It only makes it worse for me. Truly, I ask for my own sake, not for yours. Do you not see? When all the ripples have gone from the pond I shall forget I ever threw that stone...." Was it not strange that this girl, on whose mind the dew was not yet dry, should speak the same wise words that had been found fittest by a woman who had been educated by a tragic destiny? But of course she was as wise as she was beautiful. His thought of Marion became fatigued and resentful because it had made him forget the marvel of his Ellen.

"Forgive me," he murmured.

"Of course I forgive you."

"What, before I have told you what it is I want forgiveness for?"

"I have it in my mind I will always forgive you for anything you do."

"That's a brave undertaking!"

They laughed into each other's faces through the dusk. "Well, I've always hankered after a chance to show I'm brave. When I was a wee thing I used to cry because I couldn't be a soldier. I had the finest collection of tin soldiers you can imagine. A pairfect army. Mother used to stint herself to buy them for me.... Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" He felt her tremble again. "Well, we've come to the end of George the Fourth Bridge. Is it not awful inappropriate to call a street after George the Fourth when it is nearly all bookshops?"

She did not name the street which they were entering. Indeed, though her breathing was tense, lethargy seemed to have fallen on her, and she slackened her pace and made him halt with her at the kerb, where they were necessarily jostled by the press of squalid people, lurching with drink or merely with rough manners, that streamed up and down this street of topless houses whose visible lower storeys were blear-eyed with windows broken or hung with rags.

"Isn't this the High Street?"

"Yes. And I wish we were here any time but this. Think if this was a fine Saturday morning now, and we were going up to the Castle to see the Highlanders drilling."

"Didn't you say the Public Health Office was opposite the Cathedral?"

"I did so. But dear knows it was ridiculous of me to drag you here. Most likely her number will not be there at all. After all, she was only taken away this morning, and the doctor said there'd be no change. He said I would be just a fule to worry."

He guided her across the road and looked for the office among the shops that faced the dark shape of the Cathedral, while she hung on his arm. "You will be angry with me for dragging you for nothing out into this awful part."

"Is this it?"

"Yes, you must look, my eyes ache," she said peevishly. "Besides, her number will not be there. Richard, did ever you see a white dog like yon in the gutter. Is it not a most peculiar-looking animal?"

After a moment's silence he said steadily, "What did you say your mother's number was?"

"Ninety-three. I told you it would not be there. Richard, look at that white dog!"

His arm slipped round her. "My little Ellen," he whispered, "Ellen!"

V

A turn of the long dark avenue brought them alongside the city of the sick, which till then had been only a stain of light on the sky, and they looked through the railings at the hospital blocks which lay spaced over the level ground like battleships in a harbour. She reproached her being as inadequate because no intuition told her in which block her mother was. After a further stretch of avenue they came to a sandstone arch with lit rooms on either side, which diffused a grudging brightness through half-frosted Windows on some beds of laurel bushes and a gravel drive. These things were so ugly in such a familiar way, so much of a piece with the red suburban streets which she knew stretched from the gates of this place through Morningside past Blackford Hill to Newington, and which had always seemed to her to shelter only the residue of life, strained of all events, that she took them as good omens.

When they went into the room on the left, and found a little office with ink-spattered walls and a clerk sitting on a high stool, she told herself, while a quarter of her mind listened to Richard explaining their errand and thought how nice it was to have a man to speak for one, that it was impossible for such an ordinary place to be the setting of an event so extraordinary, so unprecedented as death. It was true that her father was dead, but it had happened when he was abroad, and so had seemed just his last extreme indulgence of his habit of staying away from home. But the clerk sprang to his feet and, thrusting his pen behind his ear as if he were shouldering arms, said in a loud consequential voice: "Ay, I sent a messenger along to your residence the same time I 'phoned up to the Head Office to hev' the patient put on the danger list! Everything possible is done in the way of consideration for the feelings of friends and relations!" Yes, this was a hospital, and of course people sometimes died in hospitals. But she pushed away that fact and set her eyes steadily on the clerk's face, her mind on the words he had just spoken, and nearly laughed aloud to see that here was that happy and comic thing a Dogberry, a simple soul who gilds employment in some mean and tedious capacity by conceiving it as a position of power over great issues. He took a large key down from a nail on the wall and exclaimed, "I'll take you myself!" and she perceived that he was going to do something which he should have delegated to a porter, so that he might continue to display himself and his office to these two strangers.

As they passed under the arch into the hospital grounds she kept her arm in Richard's because the warmth of his body made it seem impossible that the flesh could ever grow quite cold, and fixed her attention on the little clerk, because he offered a proof that the character of life was definitely comic. But these frail assurances, that were but conceits made by the mind while it marked time before charging the dreaded truth, were overcome by the strangeness of this place. The paved corridor that followed on and on was built with waist-high walls, and between the pillars that held up the gabled wooden roof the light streamed out on lawns of coarse grass pricking rain-gleaming sod; at intervals they passed the immense swing doors of the wards, glaringly bright with brass and highly polished gravy-coloured wood; at times another corridor ran into it, and at their meeting-place there blew a swift unnatural wind, private to this place and laden with the scentless scent of damp stone; down one such they saw a group of women walking, wrapped in cloaks of different colours, flushed and cheered from some night meal, making among themselves the infantile merriment that nuns and nurses know.

This was a city unlike any other. It was set apart for the sick; and some sick people died; and of course there was no reason that people should not die merely because they were greatly beloved. She sobbed; and the clerk, who was walking on ahead of them with the gait of one who carries a standard, turned round and, waving the key, which there could be no occasion for him to use, as all the doors were open, said kindly: "You know you mustn't be downhearted. I've seen folk who came down on the verra same errand as yourselves go away in the morning with fine an' happy faces." But after half a minute the intense intellectual honesty without which he could not have been so marked a character reasserted itself, and he turned again and added reluctantly, "But I've known more that didn't." She laughed on to Richard's shoulder and crammed the speeches greedily into her memory, that some night soon by the hearth in the sitting-room at Hume Park Square she might repeat them to her mother, whom she figured sitting in the armchair, looking remarkably well and wearing the moiré blouse that she had given her for her birthday.

"She's here," said the clerk dramatically; and they stared at a door that looked like all the others. It admitted them to a rectilinear place of white doors and distempered walls. "She's upstairs!" said the clerk, and they followed him. But as he reached the top he bent double with a prodigiously respectful gesture, and cried to someone they could not see, "Good evening, sir, I've brought the friends of Ninety-three," and turned and left them with some haste, impelled, Ellen thought, as she still amusedly centred her imagination upon him, by a fear of being rebuked for officiousness. But as she came to the landing and saw the four people who were standing there, having evidently just come through the door, which one of them was softly closing, everything left her mind but the knowledge that mother was dying. They forced it on her by their appearance alone, for they said nothing. They stood quite still, looking at her and Richard as if in her red hair and his tall swarthiness they saw something that, like the rainbow, laid on the eye a duty of devout absorbent sight; and on them fell a stream of harsh electric light that displayed their individual characters and the common quality that now convinced her that mother was dying.

There were two men in white coats, one sprucely middled aged, whose vitality was bubbling in him like a pot of soup--good soup made of meat and bones, with none of the gristle of the spirit in it; the other tall and fair and young, who turned a stethoscope in his long hands and looked from the lines on his pale face to be a martyr to thought; there was a grey-haired sister with large earnest spectacles and a ninepin body; there was a young nurse whose bare forearm, as she drew the door to, was not less destitute of signs of mental activity than her broad, comely face. And it was plain from their air of indifference and gravity, of uninterested yet strained attention, that they were newly come from a scene which, though almost tediously familiar to them, yet struck them as solemn. They were banishing their impression of it from their consciousness, since they would not be able to carry on their work if they began to be excited about such every-day events. They seemed to be practising a deliberate stockishness as if they were urging the flesh to resist its quickened pulses; but their solemnity had fled down to that place beneath the consciousness where the soul debates of its being, and there, as could be seen from the droop of the shoulders and the nervous contraction of the hand that was common to all, was raising doubt and fear. The nature of this scene was disclosed as a nurse at the end of the passage passed through a swing door, and they looked for one moment into the long cavern of a ward, lit with the dreadful light which dwells in hospitals while the healthy lie in darkness, that dreadful light which throbs like a headache and frets like fever, the very colour of pain. This light is diffused all over the world in these inhuman parallelogrammic cities of the sick, and sometimes it comes to a focus. It had come to a focus now, in the room which they had just left, where mother was lying.

She ran forward to the middle-aged doctor, whom she knew would be the better one. "Can you do nothing for her?" she stammered appealingly. She wrung her hands in what she knew to be a distortion of ordinary movement, because it seemed suitable that to draw attention to the extraordinary urgency of her plea she should do extraordinary things. "Mother--mother's a most remarkable woman...."

The doctor pulled his moustache and said that there was always hope, in a tone that left none, and then, as if he were ashamed of his impotence and were trying to turn the moment into something else, spoke in medical terms of Mrs. Melville's case and translated them into ordinary language, so that he sounded like a construing schoolboy. "Pulmonary dyspnoea--settled on her chest--heart too weak to do a tracheotomy--run a tube down...." They opened the door of the room and told her to go into it. She paused at the threshold and wept, though she could not see her mother, because the room was so like her mother's life. There was hardly anything in it at all. There were grey distempered walls, a large window covered by a black union blind, polished floors, two cane chairs, and a screen of an impure green colour. The roadside would have been a richer death-chamber, for among the grass there would have been several sorts of weed; yet this was appropriate enough for a woman who had known neither the hazards of being a rogue's wife, which she would have rather enjoyed, nor the close-pressed society of extreme poverty, in which she would have triumphed, for her birdlike spirits would have made her popular in any alley, but had been locked by her husband's innumerable but never quite criminal failings into an existence just as decently and minimally furnished as this room.

Her daughter clenched her fists with anger at it. But hearing a sound of stertorous breathing, she tiptoed across the room and looked behind the screen. There Mrs. Melville was lying on her back in a narrow iron bedstead. Her head was turned away, so that nothing of it could be seen but a thin grey plait trailing across the pillow, but her body seemed to have shrunk, and hardly raised the bedclothes. Ellen went to the side of the bed and knelt so that she might look into the hidden face, and was for a second terrified to find herself caught in the wide beam of two glaring open eyes that seemed much larger than her mother's had ever been. All that dear face was changed. The skin was glazed and pink, and about the gaping mouth, out of which they had taken the false teeth, there was a wandering blueness which seemed to come and go with the slow, roaring breath. Ellen fell back in a sitting posture and looked for Richard, whom she had forgotten, and who was now standing at the end of the bed. She stretched out her hands to him and moaned; and at that sound recognition stirred in the centre of Mrs. Melville's immense glazed gaze, like a small waking bird ruffling its feathers on some inmost branch of a large tree.

"Oh, mother dear! Mother dear!"

From that roaring throat came a tortured, happy noise; and she tried to make her lips meet, and speak.

"My wee lamb, don't try to speak. Just lie quiet. It's heaven just to be with you. You needn't speak."

But Mrs. Melville fought to say it. Something had struck her as so remarkable that she was willing to spend one of her last breaths commenting on it. They both bent forward eagerly to hear it. She whispered: "Nice to have a room of one's own."

Richard made some slight exclamation, and she rolled those vast eyes towards him, and fixed him with what might have been an accusing stare. At first he covered his mouth with his hand and looked at her under his lids as if the accusation were just, and then he remembered it was not, and squared his shoulders, and went to the other side of the bed and knelt down. Her eyes followed him implacably, but there he met them. He said, "Truly ... I am all right. I will look after her. She can't be poor, whatever happens. Trust me, mother, she'll be all right," and under the bedclothes he found her hand, and raised it to his lips. Instantly the taut stare slackened, her puckered lids fell, and she dozed. Tears ran down Ellen's face, because her mother was paying no attention to her during the last few moments they were ever to be together, and was spending them in talk she could not understand with Richard, whom she had thought loved her too well to play this trick upon her. She could have cried aloud at her mother's unkind way of dying. It struck her that there had always been a vein of selfishness and inconsiderateness running through her mother's character, which had come to a climax when she indulged in this preposterous death just when the stage was set for their complete happiness. She had almost succeeded in fleeing from her grief into an aggrieved feeling, when those poor loose wrinkled lids lifted again, and the fluttering knowledge in those great glazed eyes probed the room for her and leapt up when it found her.

There was a jerk of the head and a whisper, "I'm going!" It was, though attenuated by the frailty of the dying body, the exact movement, the exact gesture that she had used when, on her husband's death, she had greeted the news that she and her daughter had been left with seventy pounds a year. Just like she had said, "Well, we must just economise!" She was going to be just as brave about death as she had been about life, and this, considering the guarantees Time had given her concerning the nature of Eternity, was a high kind of faith. "Mother dear! Mother dear!" Ellen cried, and though she remembered that outside the door they had told her she must not, she kissed her mother on the lips. "Mother dear! ... it's been so ... enjoyable being with you!" Mrs. Melville made a pleased noise, and by a weary nod of the head made it understood that she would prefer not to speak again; but her hand, which was in Ellen's, patted it.

All through the night that followed they pressed each other's hands, and spoke. "Are you dead?" Ellen's quickened breath would ask; and the faint pressure would answer, "No. I have still a little life, and I am using it all to think of you, my darling." And sometimes that faint pressure would ask, "Are you thinking of me, Ellen? These last few moments I want all of you," and Ellen's fingers would say passionately, "I am all yours, mother." In these moments the forgotten wisdom of the body, freed from the tyranny of the mind and its continual running hither and thither at the call of speculation, told them consoling things. The mother's flesh, touching the daughter's, remembered a faint pulse felt long ago and marvelled at this splendid sequel, and lost fear. Since the past held such a miracle the future mattered nothing. Existence had justified itself. The watchers were surprised to hear her sigh of rapture. The daughter's flesh, touching the mother's, remembered life in the womb, that loving organ that by night and day does not cease to embrace its beloved, and was the stronger for tasting again that first best draught of love that the spirit has not yet excelled.

There were footsteps in the corridor, a scuffle and a freshet of giggling; the nurses were going downstairs after the early morning cup of tea in the ward kitchen. This laughter that sounded so strange because it was so late reminded Ellen of the first New Year's Eve that she and her mother had spent in Edinburgh. They had had no friends to first foot them, but they had kept it up very well. Mrs. Melville had played the piano, and Ellen and she had sung half through the _Student's Song Book_, and they had had several glasses of Stone's Ginger Ale, and there really had been a glow of firelight and holly berry brightness, for Mrs. Melville, birdlike in everything, had a wonderful faculty for bursts of gaiety, pure in tone like a blackbird's song, which brought out whatever gladness might be latent in any person or occasion. As twelve chimed out they had stood in front of the chimneypiece mirror and raised their glasses above their heads, singing, "Auld Lang Syne" in time with the dancers on the other side of the wall, who were making such a night of it that several times the house had seemed likely to fall in.

When they had given three cheers and were sipping from their glasses, Mrs. Melville had said drolly: "Did ye happen to notice my arm when I was lifting it? Ye did not, ye vain wee thing, ye were looking at yourself all the time. But I'll give ye one more chance." And she had held it up so that her loose sleeve (she was wearing a very handsome mauve tea-gown bought by Mr. Melville in the temporary delirium of his honeymoon, from which he had so completely recovered that she never got another) fell back to her shoulder. "Mother, I never knew you had arms like that!" She had never before seen them except when they were covered by an ill-fitting sleeve or, if they had been bare to the elbow, uninvitingly terminating in a pair of housemaid's gloves or hands steamy with dishwashing. "Mother, they're bonny, bonny!" Mrs. Melville had been greatly pleased, but had made light of it. "Och, they're nothing. We all have them in our family. Ye have them yourself. Ye must always remember ye got them from your great-grandmother Jeanie Napier, who was so much admired by Sir Walter Scott at her first ball. And talking of dancing ...." and she had lifted up her skirts and set her feet waggishly twinkling in a burlesque dance, which she followed up with a travesty of an opera, a form of art she had met with in her youth and about which, since she was the kind of woman who could have written songs and ballads if she had lived in the age when wood fires and general plenty made the hearth a home for poetry, she could be passionately witty as artists are about work that springs from æsthetic principles different from their own. It had been a lovely performance. They had ended in a tempest of laughter, which had been brought to a sudden check when they had looked at the clock and seen that it was actually twenty-five to one, which was somehow so much worse than half-past twelve! It was that moment that had been recalled to Ellen by the sudden interruption of the pulses of the night by the nurses' laughter. That had been a beautiful party.

She would never be at another, and looked down lovingly on her mother's face, and was horrified by its extreme ugliness. There was no longer any gallant Tom Thumb wit strutting about her eyes and mouth, no little tender cheeping voice to distract the attention from the hideous ruin time had worked in her. Age diffused through her substance, spoiling every atom, attacking its contribution to the scheme of form and colour. It had pitted her skin with round pores and made lie from nose to mouth thick folds such as coarse and valueless material might fall into, and on her lids it was puckered like silk on the lid of a workbox; but if she had opened them they would only have shown whites that had gone yellow and were reticulated with tiny veins. It had turned her nose into a beak and had set about the nostrils little red tendril-like lines. Her lips were fissured with purple cracks and showed a few tall, narrow teeth standing on the pale gleaming gum like sea-eroded rocks when the tide is out. The tendons of her neck were like thick, taut string, and the loose arras of flesh that hung between them would not be nice to kiss, even though one loved her so much.

Really she was very ugly, and it was dreadful, for she had been very beautiful. Always at those tea-parties to which people were invited whom Ellen had known all her life from her mother's anecdotes as spirited girls of her own age, but which nobody came to except middle-aged women in shabby mantles, though all the invitations were accepted, someone was sure to say: "You know, my dear, your mother was far the prettiest girl in Edinburgh. Oh, Christina, you were!..." It was true, too, a French artist who had come to Scotland to decorate Lord Rosebery's ballroom at Dalmeny had pestered Mrs. Melville to sit to him, and had painted a portrait of her which had been bought by the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Ellen had never had a clear idea of what the picture was like, for though she had often asked her mother, she had never got anything more out of her than a vexed, deprecating murmur: "Och, it's me, and standing at a ballroom door as if I was swithering if I would go in, and no doubt I'd a funny look on my face, for when your grannie and me went down to his studio we never thought he really meant to do it. And I was wearing that dress that's hanging up in the attic cupboard. Yes, ye can bring it down if ye put it back as ye find it." It was a dress of white ribbed Lille silk, with thick lace that ran in an upstanding frill round the tiny bodice and fell in flounces, held here and there with very pink roses, over a pert little scalloped bustle; she visualised it as she had often held it up for her mother to look at, who would go on knitting and say, with an affectation of a coldly critical air, "Mhm. You may laugh at those old fashions, but I say yon's not a bad dress."

It was, Ellen reflected, just such a dress as the women wore in those strange worldly and passionate and self-controlled pictures of Alfred Stevens, the Belgian, of whose works there had once been a loan collection in the National Gallery. Her imagination, which was working with excited power because of her grief and because her young body was intoxicated with lack of sleep, assumed for a moment pictorial genius, and set on the blank wall opposite the portrait of her mother as Alfred Stevens would have painted it. Oh, she was lovely standing there in the shadow, with her red-gold hair and her white skin, on which there was a diffused radiance which might have been a reflection of her hair, and her little body springing slim and arched from the confusion of her skirts! The sound of the "Blue Danube" was making her eyes bright and setting her small head acock, and a proud but modest knowledge of how more than one man was waiting for her in there and would be pleased and confused by her kind mockery, twisted her mouth with the crooked smile of the Campbells. Her innocence made her all sweet as a small, sound strawberry lying unpicked in the leaves, and manifested itself in a way that caused love and laughter in this absurd dress whose too thick silk, too tangible lace, evidently proceeded from some theory of allurement which one had thought all adults too sophisticated to hold.

Oh, she had been beautiful! Ellen looked down in pity on the snoring face, and in the clairvoyance of her intense emotion she suddenly heard again the crisp rustle of the silk and looked down on its yellowed but immaculate surface, and perceived that its preservation disclosed a long grief of her mother's. That dress had never been thrown, though they had had to travel light when Mr. Melville was alive, and the bustled skirt was a cumbrous thing to pack, because she had desired to keep some relique of the days when she was so beautiful that an artist, a professional, had wanted to paint her portrait. An inspiration occurred to Ellen, and she bent down and said, "Mother, Richard and me'll go to New York and see your portrait in the Museum there." The dying woman jerked her head in a faint shadow of a bridle and made a pleased, deprecating noise, and pressed her daughter's hand more firmly than she had done for the last hour. Ellen wept, for though these things showed that her mother had been pleased by her present words, they also showed that she had been conscious of her beauty and the loss of it. She remembered that that New Year's Eve, seven years before, before they had gone up to bed, her mother had again held up her arm before the mirror and had sighed and said: "They last longer than anything else about a woman, you know. Long after all the rest of you's old ye can keep a nice arm. Ah, well! Be thankful you can keep that!" and she had gone upstairs singing a parody of the Ride of the Valkyries ("Go to bed! Go to bed!").

Of course she had hated growing old and ugly. It must be like finding the fire going out and no more coal in the house. And it had been done to her violently by the brute force of decay, for her structure was unalterably lovely, the bones of her face were little but perfect, the eye lay in an exquisitely-vaulted socket; and everything that could be tended into seemliness was seemly, and the fine line of her plait showed that she brushed her grey hair as if it were still red gold. Age had simply come and passed ugliness over her, like the people in Paris that she had read about in the paper who threw vitriol over their enemies. This was a frightening universe to live in, when the laws of nature behaved like very lawless men. She was so young that till then she had thought there were three fixed species of people--the young, the middle-aged, and the old--and she had never before realised that young people must become old, or stop living. She trembled with rage at this arbitrary rule, and sobbed to think of her dear mother undergoing this humiliation, while her free hand and a small base fraction of her mind passed selfishly over her face, asking incredulously if it must suffer the same fate. It seemed marvellous that people could live so placidly when they knew the dreadful terms of existence, and it almost seemed as if they could not know and should be told at once so that they could arm against Providence. She would have liked to run out into the sleeping streets and call on the citizens to wake and hear the disastrous news that beautiful women grow old and lose their beauty, and that within her knowledge this had happened to one who did not deserve it.

She raised her head and saw that the young nurse who had been coming in and out of the room all night was standing at the end of the bed and staring at her with lips pursed in disapproval. She was shocked, Ellen perceived, because she was not keeping her eyes steadfastly on her mother, but was turning this way and that a face mobile with speculation; and for a moment she was convinced by the girl's reproach into being ashamed because her emotion was not quite simple. But that was nonsense; she was thinking as well as feeling about her mother, because she had loved her with the head as well as with the heart.

Yet she knew, and knew it feverishly, because night emptied of sleep is to the young a vacuum, in which their minds stagger about, that in a way the nurse was right. If she had not been quite so clever she would never have made her mother cry, as she had done more than once by snapping at her when she had said stupid things. There rushed on her the recollection of how she had once missed her mother from the fireside and had thought nothing of it, but on going upstairs to wash her hands, had found her sitting quite still on the wooden chair in her cold bedroom, with the tears rolling down her cheeks; and how, when Ellen had thrown her arms round her neck and begged her to say what was the matter, she had quavered, "You took me up so sharply when I thought Joseph Chamberlain was a Liberal. And he was a Liberal once, dear, when your father and I were first married and he still talked to me. I'm sure Joseph Chamberlain was a Liberal then." At this memory Ellen put her head down on the pillow beside her mother's and sobbed bitterly; and was horrified to find herself being pleased because she was thus giving the nurse proof of proper feelings.

She sat up with a jerk. She was not nearly nice enough to have been with her mother, who was so good that even now, when death was punishing her face like a brutal and victorious boxer, bringing out patches of pallor and inflamed redness, making the flesh fall away from the bone so that the features looked different from what they had been, it still did not look at all terrible, because the lines on it had been traced only by diffidence and generosity. With her ash-grey hair, her wrinkles, and the mild unrecriminating expression with which she supported her pain, she looked like a good child caught up by old age in the obedient performance of some task. That was what she had always been most like, all through life--a good child. She had always walked as if someone in authority, most likely an aunt, had just told her to mind and turn her toes out. It had given her, when she grew older and her shoulders had become bent, a peculiar tripping gait which Ellen hated to remember she had often been ashamed of when they went into tea-shops or crossed a road in front of a lot of people, but which she saw now to have been lovelier than any dance, with its implication that all her errands were innocent.

"Mother, mother!" she moaned, and their hands pressed one another, and there was more intimate conversation between their flesh. Her exalted feelings, as she came out of them, reminded her of other shared occasions of ecstasy. She remembered Mrs. Melville clutching excitedly at her arm as she turned her face away from the west, where a tiny darkness of banked clouds had succeeded flames, round which little rounded golden cloudlets thronged like Cupids round a celestial bonfire, and crying in a tone of gourmandise, "I would go anywhere for a good sunset!"

There was that other time that she had been so happy, when they had watched the fish-wives of Dunbar sitting on tubs under great flaring torches set in sconces on the wall behind them, gutting herrings that slid silver under their quick knives and left blood on their fingers that shone like a fluid jewel, raw-coloured to suit its wearers' weathered rawness, and lay on the cobbles as a rich dark tesselation. The reflected sunset had lain within the high walls of the harbour as in a coffin, its fires made peaceful by being caught on oily waters, and above the tall roof-trees of the huddled houses behind the stars had winked like cold, clever eyes of the night. Mrs. Melville had circled about the scene, crying out at all its momentary shifts from key to key of beauty, murmuring that the supper would be spoiling and the landlady awful annoyed, but she must wait, she must wait. When the women had stopped gutting and had arisen, shaking a largesse of silver scales from their canvas aprons, and the dying torches had split and guttered and fallen from the sconces and been trodden out under the top-boots of bearded men, she had gone home with Ellen like a reveller conducted by a sober friend, exclaiming every now and then with a fearful joy in her own naughtiness, "It's nearly nine, but it's been worth it!"

For this innocent passion for beauty the poor little thing (Ellen remembered how lightly her mother had weighed on her arm that night, though she was tired) had made many sacrifices. To see better the green glass of the unbroken wave and hear the kiss the spray gives the sea on its return she would sit in the bow of the steamer, though that did not suit her natural timidity; and if passengers were landed at a village that lay well on the shore she would go ashore, even if there were no pier and she had to go in a small boat, though these made her squeal with fright. And there was an absolute purity about this passion. It was untainted by greed. She loved most of all that unpossessable thing, the way the world looks under the weather; and on the possessable things of beauty that had lain under her eyes, in the jewellers' windows in Princes Street or on the walls of the National Gallery, she had gazed with no feelings but the most generous, acclaiming response to their quality and gratitude for the kindness on the part of the powers that be. She had been a good child: she hadn't snatched.

But when one thinks of a good child faithfully adhering to the nursery ethic the thought is not bearable unless it is understood that there is a kind nurse in the house who dresses her up for her walk so that people smile on her in the streets, and maybe buys her a coloured balloon, and when they come back to tea spreads the jam thick and is not shocked at the idea of cake. But mother was lying here in a hospital nightgown of pink flannel, between greyish cotton sheets under horse-blankets, in pain and about to die; utterly unrewarded. And she had never been rewarded. Ellen's mind ran through the arcade of their time together and could find no moment when her mother's life had been decorated by any bright scrap of that beauty she adored.

Ellen could see her rising in the morning, patting her yawning mouth with her poor ugly hands, putting her flannel dressing-gown about her, and treading clumsy with sleep down the creaky stairs to put the kettle on the gas, on her knees before the kitchen range, her head tied up in a handkerchief to keep the ash out of her hair, sticking something into the fire that made disagreeable grating noises which suggested it was not being used as competently as it might be; standing timidly in shops, trying to attract the notice of assistants who perceived she was very poor: but she could never see her visited by beauty. For her it had stayed in the sunset. It might have abode with her in the form of love: indeed, Ellen thought that would have been the best form it could have taken, for she knew that she could be quite happy, even if her life were harder than her mother's in the one point in which it could be harder and there were not enough to eat, provided that she had Richard. But she felt it impossible that her mother could have sipped any real joy from companionship with herself, whom she conceived as cold and vicious; and pushing her memory back to the earliest period, where it hated to linger, she perceived innumerable heartrending intimations that the free expenditure of her mother's dearness had brought her no comfort of love.

She could remember no good of her father. It was his habit to wear the Irish manner of distraction, as he walked the streets with his chin projected and his eyes focussed in the middle distance to make them look wild, but his soul was an alert workman who sat tightening screws. By neat workmanship he could lift from negligences any reproach of negativeness and turn them into positive wounds. If he were going to send his wife too little money, and that too late, he would weeks before lead her to expect an especially large cheque so that she would dream of little extravagances, of new shoes for Ellen, of sweets and fruit, until they were as good as bought, and the loss of them added the last saltness to the tears that flowed when there had at last arrived not quite enough to pay the rent. He was indeed a specialist in disappointment. Ellen guessed that he had probably preluded this neglectful marriage by a very passionate courtship; probably he had said to mother the very things that Richard said to her, but without meaning them. At that she shivered, and knew the nature of the sin of blasphemy.

How her mother had been betrayed! It was as monstrous a story as anything people made a fuss about in literature. What had happened to Ophelia and Desdemona that had not happened to her mother? Her heart had broken just as theirs did, and in the matter of death they had had the picturesque advantage. And her father, was he not as dreadful as Iago? Thinking so much of him brought back the hated sense of his physical presence, and she saw again the long, handsome face, solemn with concentration on the task of self-esteem, surmounted by its high, narrow forehead, and heard the voice, which somehow was also high and narrow, repeating stories which invariably ran: "He came to me and asked me ... and I said, 'My dear fellow....'" For, like all Irishmen, he was fond of telling stories of how people brought him their lives' problems, which he always found ridiculously easy to solve. Everything about him, the sawing gestures of his white, oblong hands, the cold self-conscious charm of his brogue, the seignorial contempt with which he spoke of all other human beings and of all forms of human activity save speculation on the Stock Exchange, seemed to have a secondary meaning of rejection of her mother's love and mockery of her warm, loyal spirit. There spoke, too, an earnest dedication to malignity in the accomplishment to which he had brought the art of telling unspoken, and therefore uncontradictable, lies about her mother. If, after helping him on with his coat in the hall and laying a loving hand on his sleeve because he looked such a fine man, she asked him for money to pay the always overdue household bills, or even to ask whether they would wait dinner for him, he would say something quite just about the untidiness of her hair, follow it up by a generalisation on her unworthiness, and then bang the door, but not too loudly, as if he had good-humouredly administered a sharp rap over the knuckles to a really justifiable piece of female imbecility.

Yet while she shook with hate at the memory of what her father was, she guessed what would please her mother most, and, leaning over her, she whispered, "Mother, do you hear me? I believe father did care for you quite a lot in his own way." And the dying woman lifted her lids and showed eyes that at this lovely thought had relit the fires that had burned there when she was quite alive, and pressed her daughter's hands with a fierce, jubilant pressure.

How dared her father contemn her mother so? Her father was not a fool. That she was quite submissive to life, that it was unthinkable that she could rebel against society or persons, was not because she was foolish, but because she was sweet. To question a law would be to cast imputations against those who made it and those who obeyed it, and that was a grave responsibility; to question an act would perhaps be to give its doer occasion for remorse, and in a world of suffering how could she take upon herself to do that? She had had dignity. She had had that real wildness which her husband had aped, for she was a true romantic. She had scorned the plain world where they talk prose more expensively than most professed romantics do.

Once on the top of a tram towards Craiglockhart she had pointed out to Ellen a big house of the prosperous, geometric sort, with greenhouses and a garage and a tennis-court, and said, "Yon's Johnny Faul's house. He proposed to me once at a picnic on the Isle of May, and I promised him, but I took it back that very evening because he was that upset at losing his umbrella. I knew what would come to him from his father, but I could not fancy marrying a man who was upset at losing his umbrella." At the recollection Ellen laughed aloud, and cried out, "Mother, you are such a wee darling!"

And she was more than a romantic; she was a poet. What was there in all Keats and Shelley but just this same passion for unpossessable things? It was vulgar, like despising a man because he has not made money though it is well known that he has worked hard, to do her less honour than them because she was not able to set down in verse the things she undoubtedly felt. And she was good, so good--even divinely good. Life had given her so little beyond her meagre flesh and breakable bones that it might have seemed impossible that she should satisfy the exorbitant demands of her existence. But she had done that; she had reared a child, and of the wet wood of poverty she had made a bright fire on her hearthstone. She had done more than that: she had given her child a love that was unstinted good living for the soul. And she had done more than that: to every human being with whom she came in contact she had made a little present of something over and above the ordinary decent feelings arising from the situation, something which was too sensible and often too roguish to be called tenderness, which was rather the handsomest possible agreement with the other person's idea of himself, and a taking of his side in his struggle with fate. This power of giving gifts was a miracle of the loaves and fishes kind. "Mother, I did not desairve you!" she cried. "I do wish I had been better to you!" And what had her mother got for being a romantic, a poet, and a saint who worked miracles? Nothing. This snoring death in a hospital was life's final award to her. It could not possibly be so. She sat bolt upright, her mouth a round hole with horror, restating the problem. But it was so. A virtuous woman was being allowed to die without having been happy.

"Oh, mother, mother!" Ellen wailed, wishing they had not embarked on the universe in such a leaky raft as this world, and was terrified to find that her mother's hand made no answer to her pressure. "Nurse!" she cried, and was enraged that no answer came from behind the screen, until the door opened, and the nurse, looking pretentiously sensible, followed the two doctors to the bed. She found it detestable that this cold hireling should have detected her mother's plight before she did, and when they took her away for a moment she stumbled round the screen, whimpering, "Richard!" trying to behave well, but wanting to make just enough fuss for him to realise how awful she was feeling.

Richard was sitting in front of the fire, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, but he jumped up alertly and gathered her to his arms.

"Richard, she's going!"

He could find no consolation to give her but a close, unvoluptuous embrace. They stood silent, looking at the fire. "Is it not strange," she whispered, "that people really die?"

Richard did not in the least participate in this feeling. He merely looked at her with misted eyes, as if he found it touching that anyone should feel like that, and this reassured her. Perhaps he knew an answer to this problem. It might be possible that he knew it and yet could not tell it, for she had never been able to tell him how she loved him, though she knew quite well. She lifted her face to his that she might see if there were knowledge in his eyes, and was disappointed that he merely bent to kiss her.

"No!" she said fretfully, adding half honestly, half because he had disappointed her. "You mustn't. I've been kissing mother."

But he persisted; and they exchanged a solemn kiss, the religious sister of their usual passionate kisses. Then she shook with a sudden access of anger, and clung to his coat lapels and stared into his eyes so that he should give her full attention, and poured out her tale of wrong in a spate of whispering. "Every night ever since I can remember I've seen mother kneeling by her bed to say her prayers, no matter how cold it was, though she never would buy herself good woollens, and never scamping them to less than five minutes. And what has she got for it? What has she got for it?" But they called for her behind the screen, and she dropped her hands and answered, pretending that her mother was so well that it might have been she who called, "I'm coming, darling."

The moustached doctor, when she had come to the foot of the bed, said gently, "I'm sorry; it's all over."

She bent a careful scrutiny on her mother. "Are you sure?" she said wistfully.

"Quite sure."

"May I kiss her?"

"Please don't. It isn't safe."

"Ah well!" she sighed. "Then we'd best be going. Richard, are you ready?"

As he came to her side she raised her head and breathed "Good night!" to that ghostly essence which she conceived was floating vaporously in the upper air and slipped her arm in his. "Good night, and thank you for all you've done for her," she said to the people round the bed. As she went to the door a remembrance checked her. "What of the funeral?"

"They'll tell you all that down at the office." This was a terrifying place, where there existed a routine to meet this strange contingency of death; where one stepped from a room where drawn blinds cabined in electric light into a passage full with pale daylight; and left a beloved in that untimely artificial brightness as in some separate and dangerous division of time; where mother lay dead.

Yet after all, because terror existed here and had written itself across the night as intensely as beauty ever wrote itself across the sky in sunset, it need not be that terror is one of the forces which dictate the plot of the universe. This was a catchment area that drained the whole city of terror; and how small it was! Certainly terror was among the moods of the creative Person, whom for the sake of clear thinking they found it necessary to hold responsible for life, though being children of this age, and conscious of humanity's grievance, they thought of Him without love. But it was one of the least frequent and the most impermanent of His moods. All the people one does not know seem to be quite happy. Therefore it might be that though Fate had finally closed the story of Mrs. Melville's life, and had to the end shown her no mercy, there was no occasion for despair about the future. It might well be that no other life would ever be so grievous. Therefore it was with not the least selfish taint of sorrow, it was with tears that were provoked only by the vanishment of their beloved, that they passed out through the iron gates.

The scene did not endorse their hopeful reading of the situation. Before them stretched the avenue, confined on each side by palings with rounded tops which looked like slurs on a score of music; to the right the hospital lay behind a flatness of grass, planted in places with shrubs; and to the left, on the slope of the hill on which the grey workhouse stood, painted the very grey colour of poverty itself, paupers in white overalls worked among bare trees. Through this grim landscape they stepped forward, silent and hand in hand, grieving because she had lived without glory, she who was so much loved by them, whose life was going to be so glorious.